I THINK IT MAY BE A BIT EARLY YET, but Colin Glassey is declaring victory in Iraq.

Meanwhile Howard Owens offers historical perspective on casualties.

Oh, and this piece by Max Boot on the media romance with guerrilla warfare — compared with its actual history of ineffectiveness, especially against American forces — is worth reading.

Mark Steyn, meanwhile, writes:

The way to understand this campaign is to look at the dogs of war that didn’t bark: no missile attacks on Israel and only a couple of perfunctory strikes at Kuwait; not a single Iraqi plane in the sky in defence of the homeland; the key river bridges mined with explosives but not a single one detonated; no significant land engagements, etc.

All these are big decisions which would have been taken at the top and, if there’s no top, nobody takes the decision. If you choose to believe that was the real deal on Saddam’s latest video, it doesn’t alter the fact that the Iraqis are still acting headless: everything that has not happened this last fortnight is consistent with the leadership being embedded into the rubble with a last startled look on their moustaches.

On the other hand, everything that has taken place is strictly local, freelance, improvised. . . .

But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it’s the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld’s view that one shouldn’t do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.

Mickey Kaus, where I first noticed this Steyn link, has much more on the “were there enough troops or not?” debate, which I think is likely to wind up a draw: Could we have beaten the Iraqi military with fewer troops? Yes. Would it have been nice to have more troops for occupation/pacification? Yes. Does that mean our force levels were right? Depends on what other threats we might have been worried about — it’s entirely possible, for example, that North Korea might have been more adventurous if we had seemed to be committing everything we had in Iraq. Who knows? Somebody had to make an informed guess, and so far the results make the guess look pretty good. That’s my take, anyway. Meanwhile, a guy in the bar last night observed that you can tell how the war is going just from glancing at the television — they used to be showing maps of Iraq, but now they’re showing maps of Baghdad.

In a related development, try not to be shocked but a German investigation suggests a Saudi government link with Al Qaeda:

GERMAN OFFICIALS SAY the terror suspects may have had a highly placed friend: a top diplomat at the Saudi Embassy in Berlin. Sources say Muhammad J. Fakihi, chief of the embassy’s Islamic-affairs branch, met frequently with the suspected terrorist cell’s leader, Ihsan Garnaoui, at Berlin’s Al Nur mosque—a notorious haven for Islamic extremists. The Germans confronted the Saudis and threatened to declare Fakihi persona non grata. “We don’t do that unless the evidence is very grave,” says a German official. Four days after the arrests, Fakihi left Germany and was supposed to have returned to Saudi Arabia. But, NEWSWEEK has learned, he never showed up. Now the Saudis want him for questioning, and officials are uncertain of his whereabouts.

Hmm. I know what I hope happened, and I know what I think happened, but I wonder what really happened?