Fallujah

Belmont Club has the fascinating details. Also, this blog is getting a rep as the go-to place for Fallujah analysis. I haven't yet read it, myself.

Lileks (best writer in America!) gives the Marines a tribute, at the end of a really happening Bleat:

Gnat just reentered the room. Screams: Play me a disco girl song!

Sigh. I call up the playlist of stupid 70s songs; oh perfect: Love is in the Air, by John Paul Young. Wife enters room; does bump with Gnat. Ten seconds before Jasper comes in and barks in alarm. Hell, I might as well dance too. Back in a minute.

Did “Stayin’ Alive” with all the clichéd disco moves, with improvements; Travolta never picked up his partner and spun her over his head eight times. Now the dog is seriously alarmed. OKAY! SHUT UP! QUAALUDES FOR EVERYONE! Time to find a room-clearer to get them out of my hair so I can work. Searching . . . searching . . . ah. HALO soundtrack. That’ll work.

Oh: my stars. HALO 2 comes out tomorrow. Well, I’ll buy it, but I won’t play it yet. Better to spend the hour reading news and blogs about Fallujah than to play soldier on a TV screen. This is one of the big battles of the Iraq campaign; this is where the loop that began in Somalia is closed and welded shut.

Paul Harvey, of all people, noted that the hard phase of the battle would involve house-to-house combat, “just like Vietnam.” Sigh. It’s now the all-purpose metaphor. There could be a war on the moon with armies on dune buggies launching crossbows at each other, and someone would pronounce it a repeat of a disastrous battle in the Mekong Delta. But he’d be 108 years old, the last boomer, a brittle old survivor - not the Greatest Generation but the Generation that Grates, determined that any conflict should be seen through the prism of his youth with “White Rabbit” playing in the background. Times have changed. It's FLIR and Kid Rock now, I think. Stay tuned, and keep them in your thoughts.

The Marines, I mean.