Who are you calling Flip Flopper?

Indecisiveness at it's worse.

Responding to the killing and subsequent mutilation of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah on March 31, Conway had led a 5,000-man Marine force that laid siege to the restive town for over three weeks. Bad press and reports of civilian casualties by Al-Jazeera later caused the Marines to halt their advance into the heart of the city and, on the eve of a renewed offensive, the Marines unexpectedly turned over the town to a local militia force that later became known as the Fallujah Brigade.

Reflecting on the course of the White House-ordered campaign on Sunday, Conway indicated that he had had serious misgivings about the Fallujah operation from the get-go, "We felt that we probably ought to let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," he told reporters gathered on the sprawling Marine base just east of the embattled town. "I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed."

The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military's tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.

To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch. Says Kaplan, who was embedded with the Marines during the opening stages of the battle and who later wrote about it for the Atlantic Monthly, "It's fine to send in the Marines. It's fine to have a cease-fire, but you can't do both. What this amounts to is ... foreign policy incoherence."


Pot, meet kettle...