Today’s Washington Post has an intriguing story about the Pentagon’s plans for invading Iraq. A rapid assault is being considered in which a softening-up bombing campaign could be as short as two or three days, followed by fast-moving land attacks aimed not at troops, bases and bridges but “regime targets,” such as Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit. “Our interest is to get there very quickly, decapitate the regime, and open the place up, demonstrating that we’re there to liberate, not to occupy,” one military planner tells the Post. The paper quotes another planner as saying, “The Iraqi military will be told, ‘if you come out of your staging areas, you’ll be destroyed, but if you stay, you’ll live.'” If the fighting goes well, it could be over in a week, according to the best-case scenario.
Two other articles worth reading about Iraq: this one, by Jim Fallows in The Atlantic, notes the great difficulty we may have governing Iraq after Saddam has been ousted. And in this story, in The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann argues that the war on Iraq distracts America from the threat posed by Al Qaeda. The piece includes the following quote from Steven Van Evera: “Defining it as a broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don’t take your eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iraq. Instead, the Administration defined it as a broad war on terror, including groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and never will. It leads to a loss of focus. Al Qaeda escapes through the cracks…We’re not out of Bosnia and Kosovo yet, and Iraq is much bigger. It’s a huge occupation and reconstruction. We aren’t good at this.”
