Dont buy into the hype about the US "retreating" in Fallujah that is being perpetuated everywhere. The Inquirer is leading the charge:

Masked men carrying grenade launchers and waving Iraqi flags rode through the streets of Fallujah yesterday, claiming victory in the withdrawal of U.S. Marines after a monthlong siege of the city.

A day after the U.S.-led coalition announced it was handing over most Fallujah security matters to a popular general from the former Iraqi regime, Fallujah residents tentatively stepped out of shuttered homes to find demolished buildings, uprooted palm trees, rows of shelled villas, and car windows riddled with bullet holes.

They took comfort in what they did not see: Americans.

"The Americans have been pushed out by true soldiers, heroic men," said Shaker Adnan, 35, who wore the burgundy beret and dark camouflage of the Fallujah Brigade, the new proxy security force assembled by the coalition. "If the Americans were men, they would have never retreated. This triumph came from God."



However, here's the real story:

If this interpretation proves to be accurate, it will have flowed directly from the basic operational requirements of Valiant Resolve. The goals of that operation would have been to root out enemy cells in Fallujah without massacring everyone in the city. This had to be accomplished against an active resistance schooled in the methods which brought the Russians to grief in Grozny. All with the final goal of wresting control of Fallujah from its gang leaders into the hands of an American-controlled Iraqi administration. And although the final victory remains to be won and 'Golan' still to be reduced, no one should ever, ever, call Marines Jarheads again without meaning it in irony.