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"The Marines are engaged in "blue-collar warfare," said Lieutenant Colonel BP McCoy, commanding officer of the Marine 3rd Battery, 4th Regiment. "There's no magic solution to it. It is just the hard-grinding work of patrols."

No one in the press is asking where the Marines are going. Their assumption is that the Marines are just walking around in circles in an appropriately journalistic manner. And just where are they going? To Al Kut on the Tigris, of course, to establish a Euphrates-Tigris line that will cut Mesopotamia in two. It is the killer blow in strategic terms. Historically, the US Army always cuts enemy countries in two before closing on their city redoubts.

The best predictor of what will happen at Baghdad is what is happening in Basra. Basra is a major city of a million people. Look at Basra and see how Tommy Franks reduces a city. You can predict US casualties in Baghdad by scaling up British casualties at Basra. And does anyone doubt that Basra will fall? The force ratios are interesting, too. The Brits are reducing Basra with a single mech infantry brigade. The US has two divisions in the Baghdad area and can bring in another soon.

The real thing to watch is the development of the logistical bases. War, at the strategic level, is all logistics. The present force of 60,000 men needs 4,500 tons a day in consumables. The 4 ID will add a burden of 2,000 per day. And we're not talking about feeding the civilians yet. That's why the seizures of H2, H3, Talil, Basur and Umm Qasar (to mention only the ones I know about) were the decisive battles of the war. And, get this, they were planned long before the press started raising objections about "underrating" the Iraqi enemy.