[Cicero]

Actually, it could be.

In the first Gulf War, it was obvious months ahead of time that we were going to stage a flanking armor attack around the western end of Saddam's dug-in defensive line. What other battle plan could we possibly use, given the layout? But after we gained full control of the air, Saddam was unable to move his troops to his right to block such a flanking maneuver, because they would have been obliterated from the air as soon as they stuck their heads up.

In other words, sometimes it doesn't help much to know what the other side will do, unless you can find a useful counter to it.

One obvious reason why Bush has waited so long to mount an attack is that, as was well publicized, clinton exhausted almost all our cruise missiles in the Balkans on pointless targets. So now, presumably, Boeing has had time to replace them. Reports back then said it would take a couple of years to gear up the assembly line and get them rolling off it.

[blam]

Schwartzcof(sp) said, after the war, that his biggest fear of the whole war was that Saddam was luring him out into the western desert to detonate a nuke.