HOWARD VEIT HAS A THEORY:

The continuing supposed leaks over the past six months from State, Defense, retired Army, etc., makes me wonder if any attack on either Iraq or Iran is in the cards at all.

Back when the Civil War was about to start, General Winfield Scott who won the Mexican War, proposed a strategy called Anaconda. He proposed a total blockade of the South including all shipping. He said the South would be starved out within three years. Most military scholars today say that the strategy would have worked and the loss of life would have been very small.

Nobody wanted that. Everybody wanted blood, so the Anaconda was dumped. What we are doing now is an “Anaconda” on Iraq and quite a bit on Iran. We are squeezing their governments and their economies. Iran is about to blow sky high and Saddam is a raging paranoid with an economy in free fall. My feeling is that we are seeing a very good show being put on by the administration: battle plans, bombing raids, mystery troop movements, CIA operatives, shipping interdictions, and today’s so-called “leaks” to the Washington Post all seem to state that this squeeze is policy right now and that it is working.

Yeah, but when it was over the South knew it had been beaten, and was never any trouble again. Anyway, I don’t believe it. To make a plan like that work, you’d need people as smart as Donald Rumsfeld, or Condi Rice, or Colin Powell.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias disputes my “no trouble” assessment, citing Jim Crow, etc. Well, as seemed obvious to me, I was talking about Civil-War type trouble. Nor was Jim Crow “trouble” to the North, which didn’t mind it at all. Indeed, Washington, D.C. (which was, you know, the capital of the North during the Civil War) was probably the most segregated city in America during the first half of the 20th century.