One of Ours

...This is a Sunni Arab town full of people with blood on their hands. Fallujah was long a prime recruiting ground for the secret police and Republican Guard. Saddam was good to Fallujah, and the thugs of Fallujah were merciless against Saddam's enemies. But Saddam's enemies are the majority of the Iraqi population and soon that majority will be electing a government. This government would send as many police and soldiers to Fallujah as is needed to round up and punish all the guilty. Unfortunately, the way things work in the Middle East, this could easily leave Fallujah a pile of smoking rubble, and most of the population dead or fled. The Arab world would have had to deal with it. Arabs killing Arabs is nothing new, in fact it's quite normal in the Middle East, a land of tyrants, torture chambers and secret police.

However, coalition trainers hoped to have convinced the new Iraqi police to go in Fallujah and smoke out the guilty hordes more precisely and with less bloodshed. Flood Fallujah with Iraqi police and soldiers and go house to house looking for weapons and known, and suspected, criminals. Most of Saddam's thugs operated quite openly. People knew the names. They still know the names. Next year, the Iraqi police could arrest the names, put them on trial, convict them for crimes against humanity and imprison or execute them. This is why the people of Fallujah are so eager to kill outsiders. It's not just a habit they can't shake, it's a defensive mechanism. Eventually, someone is going to come to Fallujah to look for Saddam's thugs, and the thugs know it...