Perspective on the duration of war

TownHall.com ^ | Friday, April 4, 2003 | by Charles Krauthammer

[JohnHuang2]

WASHINGTON--The First Gulf War took six weeks. Afghanistan took nine. Kosovo, eleven. We are now just past two weeks in the Second Gulf War. It's time for a bit of perspective. This campaign has already been honored with a ``quagmire'' piece by The New York Times' Johnny Apple, seer and author of a similar and justly famous quagmire piece on Afghanistan published just days before the fall of Mazar-e Sharif and the swift collapse of the Taliban.

The drumbeat of complaint for the first two weeks from the media, retired generals and anonymous administration malcontents has been twofold: the ``flawed plan'' and the raised expectations.

With American troops at the gates of Baghdad, the plan is looking pretty good now. But even when things looked tough in Week Two, the frenzy of the critics was a bit weird. It's an old military cliche that all plans look great until the shooting starts. Then the plan is thrown out. Nonetheless, Tommy Franks' plan has fared better than most. It may not have anticipated the level of initial resistance in the south. But this is a campaign of staggering complexity. The fact that but a single element was miscalibrated (without significant damage to the overall campaign) is, on the contrary, testimony to a plan of remarkable prescience.

[JohnHuang2]

Friday, April 4, 2003

Quote of the Day by PogySailor

[justa-hairyape]

IMHO - The talk that there might be mass surrenders was mostly put out to make the decision to go to war seem less risky. Actually, I suspect they were expecting much more resistance in the south and throughout the rest of Baghdad. Why else would they think they needed the 4th ID. It appears that the 4th ID will turn out to be overkill, because the resistance from the Iraqi military and paramilitary has been much LESS then expected. The left, anti-war and anti-Bush crowd however wont let reality crowd their dellusions of 'insightful observations'.