The money paragraph in the Washington Post this morning (I cannot read the New York Times right now) is the following:
An uprising in Basra has the potential to alter the political landscape across southern Iraq in a matter of days, forcing Hussein loyalists to flee for their lives and placing Shiite leaders in control of local affairs. Likewise, if U.S. forces are able to quickly quash Republican Guard units around Karbala and Kut, Hussein’s government in Baghdad would find itself without regular military defenses against a U.S. attack.
That’s the strategy. But the deeper truth is that speed, while wonderful, isn’t everything. We have more and more troops coming in; Saddam is losing hundreds daily and is slowly running out of options which aren’t war crimes. Shouldn’t we wait for the biggest possible force before moving on Baghdad? Gregg Easterbrook has a good, if limited, analogy:
Saddam’s professional army is now fighting like it doesn’t plan to give up – exactly as the French fought in the early days of the Nazi attack in 1940. And that makes perfect sense: Saddam’s professional army doesn’t yet have to give up because it still has men and materiel. But every day it will have less of both, while every day the United States has more, as more forces enter the region. France in 1940 went from determined resistance to collapse almost without warning. This may still happen to Iraq, just not the in 48 or 72 hours that commentators foolishly predicted.
Iraq cut and ran in 1991 in less than 100 hours because the fight then was to expel Saddam’s legion from a neighbor; pretty much the moment Iraqi commanders realized they were being pounded, they turned and sprinted back to the safe turf of their home country, where the coalition left them alone. Now Saddam’s legions, and his Baath Party, have no safe turf to which to retreat. So they’re not yielding, at least not yet, just as the French, with nowhere to retreat, initially resisted the odds.
Makes sense to me. But it also makes sense to bring more troops into the theater as soon as we possibly can. So we need patience now. And domestic nerve.
The Dish 