Go read this column by David Warren, which opens with this graf:
You wouldn’t know it from reading most of the papers, but the war in Iraq is going fabulously well. After just five days the U.S. Third Infantry Division and supporting units are approaching Baghdad. The immense steel column continues to drive reinforcements across the Iraqi desert, while its leading edge rumbles through the fields, villages, and waterways of Mesopotamia. To its rear, the “sleeper cells” of Ba’athist and terrorist hitmen waiting in ambush are being eliminated one by one. Special forces have seized bridges, dams, airstrips, oil and gas fields, and weapons sites all over the country. The U.S. Air Force has devastated leadership targets, military infrastructure, and the physical symbols of the Saddam regime, across Baghdad and elsewhere. Allied troops have Basra, Nasiriyah, now Karbala, and other Iraqi cities surrounded, and are tightening each noose. Snipers in the towns are being patiently deleted. The “Scud box” of western Iraq is in allied hands, daily more secure, and allied forces are building with endless air deployments to the northern front. In all, the allies have taken only a few dozen killed, and a couple hundred lesser casualties — many of these from small accidents within the most amazing and vast logistical exercise since our troops landed in Normandy (when we lost men at the rate of up to 500 a minute, liberating France).
Then go check the front page of the NY Times.
First, there is Michael Gordon’s The Goal Is Baghdad, but at What Cost?, charitably labeled as a ‘military analysis’ and running with this tag:
The cost of taking Baghdad and dislodging Saddam Hussein’s government, in terms of both allied and Iraqi casualties, is uncertain.
The second story is titled G.I.’s Regroup After Setback
Dean
What is WITH these people? Do they really think a military is simply some buncha folks given guns and the same clothes to wear??
A military, even Iraq’s, is trained to fight. To expect it simply roll over and surrender is asinine. That as many have is a sign of bad morale. But MOST armies fight (and good armies fight very well).
Even videogames, oft-derided as armchair fighting, doesn’t have the bad guys offering themselves up to surrender (or be killed). Any student of history, however, will find that MOST armies fight, to some extent (and worse armies fight for less long).
John Cole
Shrug- It almost seems like Atrios and Company are actively cheering for failure so they can pin it on the administration. Pretty disheartening.