artbrooks said Putting every house, storage building, moving vehicle or hole in the ground from which you take fire "under siege" would seem to be a good way to tie up an entire army very quickly, without accomplishing anything.

Equally killing the occupants of every house, storage building etc, would tie up an army quickly. But this way they would at least achieve a lot of dead Iraqis.

In the Mosul case, as artbrooks knows well enough, the troops were not engaged in some blanket, catch-all exercise, but were targeting one building on the basis of good intelligence from an informed source. Anyone who thinks a seige was the wrong tactic should just look again at Sanchez' response at the press conference to a question asking why he'd ruled it out.