In April 2004, the White House called off an assault by U.S. Marines on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, where four American contractors had been gruesomely murdered earlier that month by insurgents. Following the U.S. military withdrawal, radical Islamists successfully seized control of the city, which became a safe haven from which to launch terrorist attacks across Iraq. Seven months later, the Marines returned to Fallujah, with a mandate to wrest it back from the insurgency.

F. J. ’Bing’ West, a Marine officer in Vietnam and award-winning author of No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (Bantum Books, 2005), was embedded with Marine battalions in the heat of the battle. Please join AEI for a discussion with West and AEI’s Thomas Donnelly and Frederick Kagan as we approach the first anniversary of the end of second battle of Fallujah.