The lessons of urban warfare reach across thousands of years, and all the way to the gates of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.
Ancient Greece, Second World War Stalingrad, Somalia and Chechnya in the 1990s: all have seen armies pull back into cities and wait for an enemy to wade into hostile territory.
Now, it seems, it's happening in Baghdad, a sprawling city of five million people and the nucleus of Saddam's regime. Certainly that's what the Iraqi government appears to want.
"The enemy must come inside Baghdad," the Iraqi defense minister said recently, "and that will be its grave."
As thousands of allied fighters push into the outskirts of the city, coalition officials say their eventual victory isn't in question.
But the cost of that victory remains unclear, and history warns it can be the most important question of all.
Unless Iraq surrenders or the government collapses, capturing Baghdad will require sending coalition forces into the city's heart, where Saddam's most loyal soldiers will be waiting. Backed by heavy armor and following precision bombing strikes, coalition troops will slowly carve the city into manageable sectors.
Vastly superior technology, enormous numbers of potential reinforcements and constant resupply mean the coalition has little chance of failure, most analysts and historians say. But they disagree fiercely on the course of the coming days and weeks.
"The body count is going to be enormous," said Tim Ripley, a defense specialist at Lancaster University.
But Antony Beevor, a historian who has written extensively about the Second World War sieges of Berlin and Stalingrad, saw the exact opposite. "The idea that it's going to be very bloody is ridiculous," he said. Both men, though, warn the coalition must be careful that winning the final battle does not come at the cost of losing the peace.
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