corrente

Destroying the city in order to save it:

Fallouja once was home to almost 300,000 people, though most fled before U.S.-led forces launched the assault early last week. The city now lies abandoned and in ruins, a tableau of the aftermath of urban warfare.

The town's main east-west drag, a key objective of U.S. troops, is a tangle of rubble-filled lots and shot-up storefronts. Shattered water and sewage pipes have left pools of sewage-filled water, sometimes knee-deep. Scorched and potholed streets are filled with debris; power lines droop in tangles or lie on the ground.

Many mosques, the city's pride and joy, are a shambles after insurgents used them as shelter and firing positions, drawing return fire from the Marines.

Houses have been ransacked by insurgents and further damaged as U.S. troops chased snipers, searched for weapons caches or took cover in the homes. Marines routinely called in tanks, artillery and airstrikes to take out gunmen.

But the bombed-out buildings are only the most obvious damage.

There is no running water or electricity. The water, power and sewage infrastructure will probably need complete overhauls.

Food distribution systems must be reinstituted. Shops must be reopened, commerce resumed. Battered hospitals, clinics and schools must be patched up and reopened.

Beyond that, U.S. officials have lofty plans to help install a democratic government here that will answer to the administration of interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A police force of more than 1,000 officers must be deployed in a city where police have been consistently targeted for assassination in the past as collaborators with the Americans.

"The challenge is to get a civil administration up and running, and they are starting from zero," said a senior U.S. diplomat. "They have to do everything from getting the director of the waterworks to come back to work to getting a chief of police."

And, if all that wasn't enough, commanders would like the city to be ready to hold peaceful elections in January, when Iraqis nationwide are scheduled to choose a national assembly.
(via LA Times)

The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer....

Of course, Bush's goal isn't to hold peaceful elections. It's to hold elections that can be plausibly said to be peaceful, given what we will be allowed to see.