Severe imprecision

… I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er

— Macbeth, III, iv

As the month of April began, Gen. Mark Kimmitt was responding to the killing and mutilation of four paramilitary contractors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah:

Well, quite simply, we will respond. We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming. We will not rush in to make things worse. We will plan our way through this and we will reestablish control of that city and we will pacify that city.

I commended his call for a "precise" response, interpreting this at the time to mean both discriminating and proportionate.

Sadly, for all concerned, the U.S. response has been anything but precise. Fallujah is now a city under siege. American Marines are put at risk in street-to-street fighting. More than 700 Iraqis have been killed there, with hospitals reporting more than 600 civilian deaths — including more than 100 children. The city's plight has become a rallying point, uniting disparate factions of Iraqis against the U.S.-led coalition. Refugees from Fallujah are pouring into Baghdad, bringing with them a fresh wave of suspicion, fear and anti-American sentiment.

Today, the AFP reports:

… a first group of 50 families was allowed to return home after two weeks of fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents left hundreds dead and the city in tatters.

"Fifty families were allowed to enter today, 50 families will be allowed tomorrow and 50 the day after that," Lieutenant Colonel Ronny Gordy, of the US marines, told AFP at a roadblock at the eastern edge of the city.

How exactly does the siege of an entire city — one with a population about the size of Cleveland's — constitute a "precise" response?

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi condemned the U.S. siege of Fallujah. "Collective punishment is certainly unacceptable," he said, "and the siege of the city is absolutely unacceptable."

Tactics like this suggest that perhaps President Bush was being more candid than he realized when he compared the "liberation" of Iraq to the American "liberation" of The Philippines last October. That effort, as Slate's Fred Kaplan reminds us:

… was marked by much burning, pillaging and torturing, and the commanders finally achieved victory through a strategy of isolating the guerrillas. They did this by forcing the civilian population out of towns and into "protected zones"; able-bodied men found outside the zones without a pass were arrested or shot.

Even so, sporadic uprisings continued … The American military occupation was forced to remain for 44 years.

In Sunday's New York Times, Niall Ferguson suggests a different historical analogy — one that is more recent and much closer to home — the British occupation of Iraq following the regime change that overthrew the Ottoman Empire:

Then, as now, the rebels systematically sought to disrupt the occupiers' communications — then by attacking railways and telegraph lines, today by ambushing convoys. British troops and civilians were besieged, just as hostages are being held today. Then as now, much of the violence was more symbolic than strategically significant — British bodies were mutilated, much as American bodies were at Falluja. By August of 1920 the situation was so desperate that the general in charge appealed to London not only for reinforcements but also for chemical weapons (mustard gas bombs or shells), though these turned out to be unavailable.

And this brings us to the second lesson the United States needs to learn from the British experience. Putting this rebellion down will require severity. In 1920, the British eventually ended the rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions. It was not pretty. Even Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for the air force, was shocked by the actions of some trigger-happy pilots and vengeful ground troops. And despite their overwhelming technological superiority, British forces still suffered more than 2,000 dead and wounded.

Ferguson would have us forgo precision entirely in exchange for a pragmatic "severity." But can such an approach hope to result in a democratic Iraq and a "transformed" Middle East?

Ferguson's history lesson stops prematurely. He traces the story only as far as 1955, the year that British troops finally withdrew from an independent Iraq.

What happened next? Thirteen years of power struggles and coups, culminating in the rise of Saddam Hussein.

The lesson of history is not, as Ferguson suggests, that "severity" works. In this case the lesson seems to be that "severity" gets you a post-colonial power vacuum followed shortly thereafter by decades of tyranny.