The United States apparently has settled on a definitive response to the recent events in Fallujah:

'Coalition forces will respond,' the U.S. army's deputy director of operations Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference. 'They are coming back and they are going to hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act.

'It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming.'

Very manly indeed. But it recalled to mind a passage I came across in James Thomas Flexner's biography of George Washington, which seemed to support a more measured approach (in 1777) to dealing with civilian resistance:

The Commander in Chief [George Washington] ruled that citizens of New Jersey, who had, under stress, sworn allegiance to the Crown, could be uncontaminated by the single act of swearing allegiance to the United States. Those who refused to do so, or who had conspicuously cooperated with the British, should not be punished, but merely escorted to the enemy lines. The wives and children of exiles could stay in their homes "if their behavior warrants." And refugees could take with them any personal possessions that would not strengthen the enemy.

The New Jersey radicals were furious that possible miscreants should get off so easily. However, time was to prove that Washington's lenient measures were not only kind but also the smartest possible politics. Waverers who were persecuted would glow with hate, while forgiven waverers were grateful. And the convinced Tories who were sent to New York were put in the most effective possible reformatory. Under the domination of military aristocrats who despised Colonials and equated their own desires with military necessity, the Tory refugees suffered from an oppression more extreme than any that the British had been accused of by the most violent patriot orators. Since Tories gathered there from all over the continent to be disillusioned, it could be argued that the British lost the Revolutionary War within the walls of their New York stronghold.

Nevertheless, a year earlier General Washington's reaction to a kind of watered down 'American Fallujah' would indicate that he was deeply sympathetic to an aggressive and violent public rejection of colonial rule:

General George Washington seems to have approved mob persecution of the Tories. In 1776 General Israel Putnam, one of Washington's generals, met a procession of the Sons of Liberty parading a number of Tories on rails up and down the streets of New York and he attempted to halt this inhuman proceeding. On hearing this, Washington reprimanded General Putnam, stating that 'to discourage such proceedings was to injure the cause of liberty in which they were engaged, and that nobody would attempt it but an enemy of his country.'

While it may not be altogether fitting to draw direct comparisons between America in the 1770's and present-day Iraq, it is certainly worth reexamining the birth of our own nation, the role of leaders like Washington, and the importance of civilian support as we subsidize a professional army of occupation in a land of swift-footed hit-&-run rebels groping their way towards unity. Perhaps kicking ass as hard as we possibly can isn't always the best policy. But what would I know. I'm just a limp-wristed pussy liberal who cries like a schoolgirl at the first hint of a slapfight.

CLARIFICATION: The examples of Gen. Washington’s tactics above are in no way contradictory, and it was not my intention to imply that they were. Washington, when the responsibility for the enforcement of discipline fell to him, always demonstrated restraint & humanity.