The American advance to the gates of Baghdad is not the end. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is undoubtedly the end of the beginning. The fact that one can, after less than a fortnight, already echo Churchill's tentative assessment after El Alamein, more than three years into the Second World War, tells us something about the magnitude of the allied achievement. The term Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war", was invented by the Nazis to describe their campaigns of 1940, which astonished the world by their swiftness. Yet it took the Germans twice as long...