Old errors meant assault became inevitable

There was something familiar in the reports from Fallujah yesterday. Just as during the invasion of Iraq last year, television pictures provided drama, but little hard information. Nobody was sure how the American assault was going.

There was something familiar in the reports from Fallujah yesterday. Just as during the invasion of Iraq last year, television pictures provided drama, but little hard information. Nobody was sure how the American assault was going.

A city still packed with civilians has been subjected to a withering assault of US air strikes and artillery. Street-to-street fighting was still a very real prospect last night. But outside the Arab world, international criticism of the US attack on the city was unexpectedly muted. There was a sense among many observers that this latest ratcheting of Iraq's agony had become inevitable.

The Americans painted themselves into a corner. The mistakes that led to yesterday's fighting were made long ago, in the invasion of Iraq and the woeful failure to administer the country afterwards. The Americans could not stand by as the country descended ever further into anarchy.

The insurgents are able to operate at will. The beheadings of Westerners and Iraqis who work for the West has wrecked any vestigial hope of rebuilding the country. The last aid agencies are fleeing.

Unless the Americans were to admit defeat and leave - which they won't, yet - they had to try to strike back at the insurgents. Fallujah's defiance has come to symbolise the insurgency, and it appears to have become a base for foreign militants such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian al-Qa'ida ally who is blamed for many of the beheadings.

But every indication is that the odds are heavily against this American counter-attack succeeding. There is no doubt the Americans have the military wherewithal to take Fallujah, or raze it. But that is not their objective: they need to stem the insurgency, and for that the signs are not good.

Insurgents can slip away to another city, or lie low and live to fight another day. That is what happened when the Americans tried to pacify Samarra last month. On Saturday the militants were back in Samarra: at least 34 people died in a wave of car bombings. Even as US troops were advancing into Fallujah yesterday, there were reports of insurgents arriving in the neighbouring city of Ramadi and taking up positions to secure the centre there.

But the Americans have more basic problems. One reason the news from Fallujah was so unclear is that the Americans' information on insurgents is sketchy. US commanders could only say that the number of insurgents was "in the ball park of 3,000". The truth is they don't know how many there are, who they are or where they are. As it is they are mounting a major assault that risks great civilian casualties which would only turn Iraq against them more completely than ever.

The Americans have made much of Zarqawi, but the signs are that he is only one among many insurgent leaders.If the Americans were to strike it spectacularly lucky, they might kill or capture him and other foreign militants, and avoid inflicting heavy casualties. But the odds are against it: the likes of Zarqawi are probably long gone.

Or the Americans may have another aim in mind: to respond to the nightmare videos of Westerners being beheaded in kind. They may feel "putting Fallujah to the torch", as it has been described in the American press, will put the insurgents on notice that they can expect horror in exchange for horror.

It is a tactic familiar from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and all it ever led to there was an endless cycle of killing.