THE BELMONT CLUB on Iraq:

It definitely shows to what great a depth the enemy resistance was prepared and how much they had invested in the Iraqi campaign in the long months while US diplomats tortuously attempted to obtain permission to topple Saddam Hussein. I believe that historians in retrospect will understand the Iraqi insurgency was not something spontaneously ignited by outbreaks of looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of OIF, but a meeting engagement between two prepared forces. Iraq, as Princeton’s Michael Doran observed, was intended to be the graveyard of America’s counteroffensive against terror. Instead the enemy dug the grave for themselves. What we are seeing now is not simply the rout of a few armed men, but terror’s greatest defeat in modern times.

I hope so.