Yes. And Bull Halsey almost blew the Battle of Leyte Gulf, BIG TIME. Only the incredible stupidity of the Jap admiral turning away at the last minute saved Halsey from going down in history as being one of the biggest blowhards ever to don a uniform.
Now, with that out of the way, I must say today has provided all kinds of signals the war is going rather well. Indeed, for the first time in about a month, I'm starting to feel confident we may actually pull this thing off. Try to remember, people, we're operating on extraoridnarily extended supply lines with about 300,000 troops to the DEFENDERS 350,000. As a general rule, defenders always have a significant advantage. The fact that in three or four days we've raced to within 70 miles of Baghdad is, frankly, breathtakingly world-historical.
Yes, we're taking casualities. And my heart bleeds for those men and their families. My prayers are with them.
But, folks, this is war. What did you think? That this would just be beer and skittles? An opportunity to chest-thump on the Internet? We're going to take casualties. Indeed, we're going to take alot more casualties. But things aren't quite as dark as they seem.
A couple of things to consider.
First, I'm intrigued by the number of firefights occurring between our forces and the so-called Special Republican Guard and these Fedayeem Saddam. These are the most fanatical of Saddam's followers and the fact he's expending them in places like Basra and Nasiriyah may be -indeed, most likely is- an indication of desperation on Saddam's part. He didn't think we could advance this quickly. He was expecting one to two weeks, at least, during which we would slowly work our way up to Baghdad. At the outset, if you'll recall, he intended to pile up casualties in our ADVANCE to Baghdad. Then, wanted to lure us into the city where his nutcase followers could force us into house-to-house fighting.
He is now sending these forces out in a desperate attempt to at least slow our advance -an advance which, while it may not appear so in an age of 24-hour cable news, got-to-have-it-now, culture, is in reality pretty shocking and pretty awe=inspiring.
I'm reminded of a comment made by a British air marshall in September of 1940. The Battle for Britain was at its peak when, late in the month, Goering shifted his bombing tactics and began carpet-bombing London. It was at that point, the Air Marshall noted, that he knew he had won. Goering had given up on his initial plan to defeat the British Air Force militarily and had turned, instead, to simple terror bombing.
In many ways, what we've seen today strikes me as similar.
A second thing to consider. These Apache attack helicopters. As others have noted, if reports are true, they've virtually decimated the primary armour of an entire division. AN ENTIRE DIVISION. Now, perhaps, as some have argued, we had tried to suppress the AAA and simply didn't do as good a job as we thought.
Or maybe, just maybe, what happened was we stumbled across them by surprise, caught them out of their bunkers or something, and the commanding officer took a bold risk and sent his helicopters off to strike a decisive blow without waiting for tasking orders, etc. Either way, this is a smashing victory.
Regardless. The CNN report almost has me laughing. I see this same reporter with our aircraft carriers at Midway breathlessly announcing our torpedo squadrons were all shot up while missing the fact we sank three carriers. (And a fourth, later in the day.)
Which brings me to our final point. My primary concern was basically if our Army had gone soft during the Clinton years. Well, if this report is true, then the answer is a resounding,"NO!" Imagine the courage it took to sit at the controls of one of those choppers, taking flak every minute, just to keep all us here free. If such is the current state of our military, this campaign will be won.