turning point?

From Associated Press:
U.S. jets have been pounding the rebel bastion for days, launching its heaviest air strikes in six months on Saturday including five 500-pound bombs dropped on insurgent targets to soften up militants.

Is it just me, or is a 250kg bomb not really the sort of thing that first springs to mind when you hear the phrase “soften up”? Did it accidentally get stacked alongside the Cuddly™ at the Baghdad Woolies? If your real intention is to bomb people to a pulp, why not just say so?

Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, told troops the coming battle of Fallujah would be "no different" than the historic fights at Inchon in Korea, the flag-raising victory at Iwo Jima, or the bloody assault to dislodge North Vietnamese from the ancient citadel of Hue they seized in the 1968 Tet Offensive.
"You're all in the process of making history," Kent told a crowd of some 2,500 Marines. "This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done kick some butt."

Kent was later reminded by his superiors of the grammatical error in ending a sentence with “butt”.

On a more serious note, wasn’t it the Tet offensive that was billed as the “turning point of the Vietnam War”? And the building-to-building battle for Hue that Sgt. Maj. Kent refers to dragged on for a month, costing hundreds of US soliers their lives. Yes, after a few weeks the Americans did manage to drive the North Vietnamese / Viet Cong back, yes the communists lost thousands of men. But it showed how tenuous the US position really was, and for the first time brought home in graphic detail the mess that they were in – from then on public opinion began to turn against the war. Are they sure that they really want to replicate that this week in Fallujah?

AP also went on to point out that the old, sick, very young, and others unable to travel were probably still trapped in the city. Poor buggers.