The Washington Post and the International New York Times had the same front-page headlines the other day. Both had to do (as the Times put it) with the "Power Void" in the Mideast, deploring that America's decade of attempting to create a new order in the region now is blowing up in its face.
It was just a decade ago when U.S. troops razed Fallujah, leaving it, as a marine officer put it to a journalist, "like Dresden" — referring to the colossal firestorm that Allied bombers created in that German city in northern Germany in 1945, in the worst single massacre in Europe during World War II.
The comparison with what happened to Fallujah has to be exaggeration, as Fallujah had a population of only 350,000 to begin with, whereas Dresden had added to a prewar population of some 650,000, many of them refugees from the Soviet offensive in the East. Fallujah just looked to the marine like pictures of Dresden in 1945. That was not a coincidence.