With No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, Bing West has created a classic chronicle of warfare. No True Glory covers both the often confused and sometimes bungled high strategy that puts young men at ultimate peril and a stark, gripping narrative of the unimaginable courage, resourcefulness, resilience and dedication of our fighting men in close, mortal combat.

Certainly, the heart of Bing West -- himself a retired Marine Colonel -- goes out to his fellow Marine commanders and troops. His work is a monument to the US Marine grunt and his supporting arms buddies who, operation-by-operation, patrol-by-patrol, street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room, haji-by-haji, grinds down the Iraqi insurgency in Fallujah.

His inspired prose puts us side-by-side with them:

• The tanker with an IV pumping fluids into his body as he fights in the 120 degrees heat; 
• Marine riflemen facing instant death, horrifying maiming or dark emptiness around every door, inside every courtyard, in every convoy; 
• Infantrymen slipping in the blood of their comrades and the enemy "hajis" as they root out terrorist killers in the endless cinder block dwellings and shops of Fallujah; 
• The brain-numbing noise, smoke and smell of intense, close combat sometimes lasting only seconds; the piercing crash of thousands of rounds, hundreds of grenades, mortar and artillery rounds and bombs; 
• Marines defying the odds to retrieve a fellow Marine who is "down" whether he is already dead, dying or in need of a corpsman; and, 
• The anguish of sometimes failing to recover a lost Marine.

Wrapped around portrayals of men at combat, West has written an insightful account of how high strategy, low politics and obstructive bureaucracy dictated the bloody fight for Fallujah.

He draws clear and straight-forward lessons of the Fallujah campaign, needlessly drawn out, costly in casualties but, ultimately, a template of how to fight this war.

The singular lesson of the Fallujah campaign is almost intuitive: when troops are committed to battle, let them finish the fight. This axiom was violated by virtually everyone in the confused civilian and military chains of command stretching from Washington to Baghdad to the Fallujah theater. As best as West can tell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld alone among our top civilian and military leadership stood firm in favor of finishing the job once started.

Fallujah was the heartland of the Iraqi "insurgency", the latter a composite of deadly gangs of Baathist hold outs, foreign jihadists, al Qaeda terrorists, street thugs and Iraqi kids fortified by drugs and fired into frenzy by cynical, anti-American clerics. Thousands of fighters, their leadership and support structure and tons of weapons, ammunition and explosives were stashed in almost every structure in the city. American troops could only drive to the city center in strong convoys supported by artillery and air cover with quick reaction forces nearby.

Angered by the murder and mutilation of four civilian contractors who stumbled into an ambush in Fallujah in March 2004 and determined not to let this turn into another "Black Hawk Down" humiliation, Washington lurched into a military strike to lance the festering sore that Fallujah had become almost from the day that Baghdad fell a year before.

With four Marine infantry battalions having secured at some cost forward positions surrounding the city in April and poised to finish the fight, the US came under withering pressure from Iraqis, the allies -- even Britain -- the UN and the international and domestic press to avoid civilian bloodshed and Fallujah's destruction. A "cease fire" was called and "negotiations" undertaken by a variety of parties on the scene, in Baghdad and abroad. Some of the efforts were sincere, many were not, and the end-result was wholly predicable. The insurgents neither complied with the cease-fire, nor seriously intended to demilitarize and vacate the city, as the many Iraqi, Arab, European and even American negotiators claimed would be the outcome.

By the end of April after weeks of dithering, sham displays of bargaining and outright cynical efforts by the insurgents and their supporters to reinforce their ranks and further fortify the city, the attack was called off. Even front-line Marine commanders, eager to finish the job and confident of success, bit their tongues and bravely supported the make-shift and ultimately doomed effort to field a "Fallujah Brigade" of locals and pro-government Iraqis to disarm the insurgents and secure the city.

When the inevitable campaign to finish the job was undertaken in November 2004, the attacking force grew to six Marine battalions, an Army cavalry squadron and massive supporting arms. Fallujah was declared secure in about a week at a cost of 70 more Americans killed, 609 wounded and 18,000 of the city's 39,000 structures destroyed or damaged. The 20 month struggle to pacify Fallujah cost 151 American lives and over a thousand wounded.

The Marines uncovered the dimensions of the terrorist sanctuary Fallujah had become: evidence of fighters from throughout the Middle East and Chechnya, Abu Musab al Zarqawi's command posts, bomb factories, torture chambers, including the location where several western hostages had been held and beheaded, ammo dumps, and fortified and interlocking fighting positions.

Another of West's important lessons of the Fallujah campaign, which will come as no surprise to those who have fought and bled in Iraq, but somehow has not been absorbed completely in the US, is that the press is not neutral. The radical Arab press, particularly Al Jazeera television and Al Arabiya television functioned as propaganda arms -- in effect - embeds in the Iraqi insurgency given unfettered access to the innards of Fallujah.

Their reporting was completely false and exaggerated particularly regarding civilian casualties caused by US military action, but it was faithfully and unquestioningly shown on western TV and repeated by the western press whose correspondents and film crews faced kidnapping and beheading were they to venture inside Fallujah.

West makes clear that the unrelenting propaganda of Al Jazeera broadcast not only throughout the Arab world but also the West, was instrumental in saving Fallujah and the Iraq insurgency from attack in late April 2004. As Lt. General James T. Conway overall Marine Commander in the Fallujah region put it: "Al Jazeera kicked our ass."

But by late summer, even the Iraqi Provisional Government had had enough and shut down Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad paving the way for the November campaign in Fallujah. On fighting their way into the city's souk, Marines uncovered prisons where al Zarqawi's hostages were held and fully outfitted television studios where many were beheaded. They found evidence that the tapes of the beheadings were rushed to Al Jazeera's offices in Baghdad via couriers using pre-designated routes and modes of transport and immediately televised worldwide.

It's noteworthy that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar and funded by the emir of Qatar, supposedly a US ally. Al Arabiya -- equally anti-American if not as notorious -- is based in Dubai and funded by a Saudi sheikh. West's book makes clear that these satellite networks indirectly cost American blood and treasure and, to this day, provide immeasurable help to America's enemies in Iraq. One wonders why Washington puts up with this and allows Al Jazeera to...