Prior to the second siege in November, its citizens were given two choices: leave the city or risk dying as enemy insurgents. The people of Falluja remembered the siege of April all too well. They remembered being trapped when Coalition forces surrounded and blockaded the city and seized the main hospital, leaving the population cut off from food, water, and medical supplies. Families remembered the fighting in the streets and the snipers on the rooftops, which prevented movement by civilians. They remembered burying more than 600 neighbors -- women, children, and men -- in makeshift graves in schoolyards and soccer fields.

Under threat of a new siege, an estimated 50,000 families or 250,000 people fled Falluja. They fled with the knowledge that they would live as refugees with few or no resources. They left behind fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, as males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied safe passage out of the city by US-led forces. If the displaced families of Falluja were fortunate, they fled to the homes of relatives in the surrounding towns and villages or to the city of Baghdad -- homes that were already overcrowded and overburdened after 20 months of war and occupation. Many families are forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care and alongside tens of thousands of displaced and homeless people already living in the rubble of Baghdad.

...."What of the estimated 50,000 residents who did not leave Falluja? The US military suggested there were a couple of thousand insurgents in the city before the siege, but in the end chose to treat all the remaining inhabitants as enemy combatants.

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military is engaged in delicate negotiations inside Sadr City to clear the way for a gradual push in coming weeks by more American and Iraqi forces into the volatile Shiite enclave of more than 2 million people, one of the most daunting challenges of the campaign to stabilize Baghdad.

..."If political avenues are exhausted, the U.S. military has formulated other options, including plans for a wholesale clearing operation in Sadr City that would require a much larger force, but commanders stress that this is a last resort.

..."A second Fallujah plan exists, but we don't want to execute it," a military officer in Baghdad said, referring to the U.S. military offensive in November 2004 to retake the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq's western Anbar province. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters.

Fallujah Plan"- Tell all civilians to flee city. Consider it fair warning. Bombard city with airstrikes. Destroy infrastructure. Impose a strict curfew on citizens ordering them to stay off the streets. Assume anyone remaining and visible in the open is a fair target. Kill whatever moves. Capture hospital. Sweep city, block by block. Bomb and destroy any building from which resistance is received. Kill the stray dogs which are eating the dead bodies in order to prevent the spread of disease. Once city is destroyed, barricaded, and sequestered, establish biometric identification system for returning citizens. Ban private vehicles. Slowly allow return of former citizens into city which is now being operated as a military-controlled same-site refugee camp (where the refugees are the returnees). Provide jobs for working-age men clearing and rebuilding the rubble of the destroyed city. Formerly independent citizens in the once functioning, independent city now rely entirely upon assistance, identity papers are carried at all times, pockets of resistance that develop are quickly dealt with, martial law remains in effect indefinitely. Finally, cross your fingers, and salute the Stars and Stripes. This is liberation.