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Civic Standard: An American Conservative Review
January 2, 1991
Why an Anglo-American dash can end the Gulf crisis in hours, not weeks
The hourglass is nearly spent. The final grains collect in the lower bulb and then rest, as if to say that time only moves in one direction. Let us take that hint. The longer we stare at sand, the more we are tempted to fetishize caution. But the lesson of an hourglass is motion. Turn it and it works; hesitate and it is a glass ornament. The President should turn it. The coalition should move. And when we move, we should move like a people who prefer peace so fiercely that we are prepared, briefly and decisively, to wage war for it.
In a matter of days—perhaps hours—the world will see whether the West still remembers what it means to defend the peace by enforcing it. The coalition has gathered, the ultimata have been issued, the arguments have been aired and exhausted.
What remains is not debate but decision. And when the decision is rendered, it ought to be swift, overwhelming, and unmistakable.
War is terrible; protracted war is worse. It grinds men and materiel, erodes domestic patience, invites miscalculation, and tempts the cynical to recast aggression as stalemate. The cure for it is not hesitation but clarity of purpose and economy of force. The coalition’s task is focused and finite: break the grip of a lawless regime on its neighbor, shatter the instruments of that aggression, and restore a boundary that never should have been crossed. We will accomplish that task by modern means and disciplined will. If we do so with speed, we will do so with mercy.
Our comparative advantages are overwhelming. In the air, the coalition already owns the night and will shortly own the day. Precision munitions guided by eyes in the sky—satellites, AWACS, and platforms the enemy cannot see—will peel away air defenses in layered bands, like the rind from an overripe fruit. The first blows will not be romantic: they will be about radars going blind, runways cratered into uselessness, command posts cut from their phones, and the long arterial roads of supply ruptured in three places at once. We will reduce fuel and ammunition to rumors. Pilots will fly their routes as if along rails; tankers will keep them aloft; the enemy will be left counting explosions rather than batteries.
If the air is the canvas, armored maneuver will be the stroke. When the ground war begins, it will not be a frontal battering at fortified berms for the sake of cable news images. It will be a set of corridors opened by breaching teams, smoke, and engineering units whose trade is patience and explosives. Through those gates will pour America’s heavy divisions—Abrams and Bradleys rolling in disciplined columns—and Britain’s modernized Desert Rats, practiced in combined arms and adept at fighting fast. The enemy’s prepared lines are only strong where they are dense; they will be fixed in place and then outflanked, their fields of fire made irrelevant by the simple, devastating choice not to drive where they are pointing.
Do not be distracted by inventories of enemy tanks and guns read out as if they were productive assets. Machines are extensions of doctrine; without initiative they are expensive bunkers. The enemy’s army is structured to receive orders from a nervous center, not to think on the move. We mean to keep that center nervous, then silent. Once their antennas droop, they will fight as scattered battalions and surrender as companies.
The British contribution deserves emphasis. RAF strike aircraft will fly at low level to rip open the enemy’s fixed sites and ammunition parks, while the Royal Navy keeps the sea lanes sterile of threat—silent, patient guardians whose best work will never make a headline. On land, British armor and artillery will serve as the coalition’s knife tip in set-piece engagements; their doctrine of speed married to professional caution has been honed in hard places. They will not let us down; more likely they will pull the rest of us forward.
Meanwhile, the Marines will loom like a storm over the coast, tying down enemy divisions that cannot be in two places at once. Amphibious craft need not even beach to achieve their purpose; the suggestion of a landing can fix a regiment more firmly to its trench than concrete. Airborne and air assault units will exploit that fixation by striking at road junctions and bridges, brief seizures that leave lasting panic. A commander who does not know where the next hand will reach is a commander who keeps both hands on his throat.
The timetable, properly executed, is measured not in weeks but in pulses. The first pulse blinds and isolates; the second breaks and dislocates; the third harvests and stabilizes. In the first pulse—hours, not days—air defenses with names we’ll all forget are neutralized, headquarters are unlit, and runways are pitted beyond use. In the second—again hours measured in two digits—breach teams punch lanes, and armored spearheads follow, not to grind forward but to slip through and fan out. The third pulse is the most delicate and the most humane: the offering of exits to those enemy soldiers who can read a situation and value their lives over their leader’s face. Human beings with empty canteens and no radio do not die for lines on a map; they walk, hands high.
Where does this momentum lead? First, and without compromise, to the liberation of the occupied territory. That is not a talking point; it is a limited objective sharpened by law and conscience. But the battlefield will not respect a political comma. When an army collapses, it collapses along the roads that lead home. If those roads run north to Basra and beyond, we will be presented with a choice: halt before a reorganizing foe because a mapmaker once drew a neat line, or press until the instruments of future aggression are wrecked beyond easy repair. I do not propose conquest. I do propose that victory be understood as more than a resupply pause. If command and control flee to the capital, it is better that they keep running than that they stop, turn, and promise to be better next season.
Some will call this maximalism; I call it realism. The shortest war is the war finished at its natural conclusion, when the enemy’s capacity to do again what summoned us in the first place has been broken and scattered to the wind. There is a myth that restraint is always the kindly option. In fact, the kindest option is decisiveness. A clean break saves lives on both sides. It allows the innocent to come out from under their tables and the world’s markets to exhale. It tells every aggressor watching that the international order is not a wish but a habit.
President Robeson understands this. He has been measured when others have been theatrical, deliberate when others were tempted to grandstand. He now has the responsibility no modern American president has yet shouldered: to order American arms not as a theoretical deterrent but as a practiced instrument. That order must be framed by clarity. The American people, and our allies, deserve a definition of success that does not smuggle in timidity disguised as prudence. The definition should be as crisp as a field order: liberate, disarm, deter the reprise. And if the battlefield opens a road to the prematurely ambitious heart of the regime that started this, the Commander-in-Chief must trust his generals to walk as far as is required to make the lesson stick.
To many of our readership, whose lives are measured in deadlines and deliverables: you are being asked to hold two thoughts at once. First, that war is not a video clip or a topology of arrows, but a human event whose gravity ought to sober the loudest among us. Second, that because war is human, the way to conduct it humanely is to end it quickly. In business, lingering problems metastasize. So in statecraft. A weekend’s worth of dithering can cost a year’s worth of stability; a week’s worth of indecision can cost a generation an inheritance of insecurity. If this is to be done, better it is done with conviction now.
We must also refuse the consolations of anxiety. There will be setbacks. A helicopter will falter, a column will find mud where the map said firm ground, a clever battery will hide and sting. None of this will alter the balance. The coalition is building not to a duel, but to an avalanche. When it moves, it will bury what opposes it and unbury what it has smothered: the ordinary peace of a small nation’s streets, the right of shoppers to haggle in markets without fear of gunfire, the simple legal fiction that borders are borders.
A word about proportionality, that heavily used term. Proportionality is not a ritual in which you match your opponent shell for shell and casualty for casualty. It is the principle that you may use the force necessary to achieve legitimate aims and not a watt more. The most proportional thing we can do is to break the enemy’s ability to resist at the outset—his radars, his fuel, his will—and then accept surrender as soon as it is offered. If our pilots fly a thousand sorties on the first night, that is not disproportionality. It is mercy in the long sum.
When this is over—and it will be over sooner than the nervous predict—the test will not be whether we can congratulate ourselves on precision footage. It will be whether the aggressor’s neighbors sleep without checking the horizon, whether our allies are steadier for having stood with us, and whether those who sneer at law understand that, under certain conditions, law has fist and foot.
“Coalition” is a fine word for communiqués, but let us speak plainly: when it is time to break steel and dictate terms, it is the English-speaking nations that have historically shouldered the necessary burden—Yorktown, Normandy, Inchon. Today, that mantle rests on armor bearing white stars and red-white-and-blue roundels: the United States Army and Marine Corps, and the British Army of the Rhine’s desert-retooled spearhead, shoulder to shoulder. If we choose the short road, the road ends not in a negotiated “status quo ante,” but on the banks of the Tigris.
What does the short road look like? Not a trench-line tug-of-war for press conferences, but a practiced, cold-blooded sequence: pin, blind, breach, envelop, pursue. The pin is already in motion: Marines hovering off the coast, their amphibs and helos a constant suggestion of a landing that never quite materializes, fixing enemy divisions to the shoreline like butterflies to cork. RAF and US strike packages run patterns low and fast to strip the opponent’s eyes and ears—radars dark, radio nets frayed, airfields stippled into impotence. That is the blind. Then the breach: engineers crawling where the artillery has just spoken, lining lanes through berms and belts with explosive hose and bulldozer patience. Smoke blooms, gaps open, and through them—here the English-speaking tradition reasserts itself—roll the instruments of decision: Abrams and Bradleys, Challengers and Warriors, guns up, discs of dust trailing like banners.
Those who fear “quagmire” quote numbers as if tables could shoot. They tally enemy tanks and claim symmetry. They miss the point. Machines are only as dangerous as the doctrine behind them. The United States and Britain will not fight by the yard but by the minute, and time is a weapon more lethal than steel when used properly. VII Corps will move like a door on a hinge: a wide left hook across harder sand and emptier maps, not to win a duel at the berm but to put an entire line out of alignment. The BAOR-forged British brigades—desert-retooled, crews that can fix a track by touch and sight in the dark—will be the hinge pin, tying down whatever nerve the enemy has left with tank gunnery that starts at two kilometers and ends at a phone call home. Once the hinge swings, the enemy’s strong points are suddenly facing yesterday’s problem. The right threats turn to wrong directions. A prepared box is a coffin if no one chooses to enter it.
Artillery is the mother of confidence. American MLRS batteries, fed coordinates by eyes above weather and horizon, will rake the depth—log parks, reserve assembly areas, the roads that feel safe until they aren’t. British AS90s and M109s, boring and indispensable, will turn crossroads into habits of avoidance. And always on the edges, attack helicopters will flick the lights off for any armor rash enough to mass in the open: the lesson written in burning silhouettes that there are no safe squares on this chessboard. We will fight at ranges the other side measures in rumor and wish.
The short road depends on logistics and will; we have both. Fuel does not win headlines, but it wins wars. In any armored dash, the ammunition truck is as decisive as the tank. Pre-positioned bladders, forward arming and refueling points that appear where yesterday there was only gravel, road discipline enforced by sergeants who consider a blocked lane a personal insult—this is the hidden geometry of victory. The British have practiced it in Germany’s winters; we have practiced it in the Mojave’s mirage. The enemy has practiced parades. There is a difference.
Understand what “to the Tigris” means. It does not mean a sentimental march to plant flags on marble. It means recognizing that the enemy’s political engine and his military drivetrain occupy the same city, that an army doesn’t simply “go home” when told; it reorganizes along the roads it knows and the signals it trusts. Those roads do not end at a line drawn on a map; they converge where orders radiate and fear condenses. If we stop at a border because cartography is polite, we will have taught a lesson in mercy to commanders who count mercy as a tactic to exploit. If instead we ride the collapse until the capital’s garrisons can no longer imagine daylight relief, we dictate the terms from a position no spokesman can spin away: your tanks are wrecks, your bridges are keyed to rubble, your lieutenants are chewing their lips trying to find batteries for dead radios, and your soldiers are walking out—hands up, boots dusty.
This is not maximalism. It is minimalism in time. The long road asks our troops to fight two wars: one to liberate what was taken, and another to sit within artillery range of a surly adversary rearming on the other bank of a river. The short road asks them to fight one decisive campaign and then go about the work of stabilization among people who can tell that the storm has passed because the thunder is not merely distant but silent. Which saves lives? Which conserves our moral capital? The answer is not a philosopher’s puzzle. Ask any company commander whether he prefers a three-day sprint through a collapsing defense or three months staring across water at an enemy who has learned from his mistakes.
There will be those who warn of cities. They will summon images of block-to-block slugfests and deadlocks in alleys. They forget that cities are as vulnerable to isolation as to assault. The English-speaking tradition does not worship the frontal attack; it worships the result. If the Tigris is the seam, then bridges are decision points. You do not need to drive a tank to every square; you need to make sure no hostile company commander believes he can move a platoon from one square to another without paying for it. Ring roads become loops of indecision. Power nodes go dark and stay dark. Loudspeakers that once barked orders will, for once, be useful: to broadcast coordinates where surrender will be accepted and water issued. Men with no clear chain of command and no confidence in relief opt for the universal compromise—life.
And it is here that the British talent for the practical will count. Where Americans bring scale and tempo, the British bring a craftsman’s touch to the seam between hard and soft power. A battlegroup that can switch from steel to restraint in a heartbeat is worth a dozen velvet press statements. Their officers, trained to drink tea with a sheikh at four and blow a bridge at five, will be the ones who hold the midpoint between victory and vindictiveness. You do not “occupy” a capital to dictate terms; you demonstrate that terms are the only route back to electricity and sleep. Our allies across the Atlantic have a gift for that demonstration, born of centuries of hard learning; it remains, unfashionably, useful.
Some will say: what of the optics? What of the fear that marching on a capital looks like empire? I say: optics are what you worry about when you have lost the plot. The plot is peace under law. The aggressor rewrote the law; we are now tasked to restore it in a way that does not invite a sequel. If we liberate and then pause within the echo of the aggressor’s artillery, we will be told by sober voices that we have been prudent. In six months those same voices will ask why we must return, again, to bomb the same depots, destroy the same divisions newly painted, jawbone the same ministries that feel time is on their side. Better to do the difficult, decisive thing once and then be done.
To those who worry that we ask too much of our troops when they have not fired in anger in a generation, I answer: precisely because they have not, they will be all the more professional when called. A machine kept idle is either rusting or polished; ours is polished. Our noncommissioned officers are not philosophers of decline; they are custodians of competence. And competence in war has its own moral dimension: it shortens the horror. The measure of a just campaign is not whether it is dainty, but whether it is brief and directed to a just end. “To the Tigris” is not bloodlust. It is the map coordinate for a conclusion that will be understood by the only audience that matters in war: the men holding rifles on the other side.
There is also a message outward, beyond this theater. The English-speaking world has not forgotten how to carry a burden together. Those who mistake our patience for paralysis will discover their error. When the United States and Britain move with purpose, the world’s most cynical calculators recalibrate. Markets steady. Small nations sleep. Opportunists blink. This is not chauvinism. It is the observation, borne out again and again, that when the arsenal of democracy and the arsenal of parliamentary grit act in concert, bad actors trim their ambitions. Yorktown ended a presumption. Normandy ended another. Inchon changed the terms of a stalemate. The banks of the Tigris can close the book on this one.
What remains is political courage. President Robeson will be told to preserve options, to keep the aim “limited,” to content himself with restoring a line and calling it wisdom. He should reject that counsel. Limitation is valuable at the podium; on the battlefield it is a euphemism for asking brave men and women to fight under a handicap. Define the end: not merely “liberate,” but “liberate and pursue the instruments of renewed aggression until they are irrecoverable.” Then trust the generals who understand that speed and shock are the shortest path to decency. Give the field commanders the freedom to exploit success. Give the spokespersons a sentence they can repeat without hedging. Give the enemy’s colonels a reason to whisper to their brigadiers that now is the moment to unlatch the bolt and raise the hands.
The short road is not a fantasy of invulnerability. A helicopter will go down. A convoy will miss a turn. A mine will take a roadwheel. The point is not perfection; it is momentum. Momentum is mercy, because it keeps the killing to a cruelly small window. When, weeks from now, families in the freed country are buying fruit in markets without glancing at the horizon, when our own newspapers struggle to squeeze war onto page A3 because it has already become yesterday’s news, it will not be because we were timid. It will be because, for once, we chose the narrow, steep path to the summit rather than the meandering trail that promises vistas and delivers avalanches.
If the hourglass is nearly spent, then turn it. Not to start the count again, but to mark a change—a before and after that even our critics will, in time, be forced to concede. The short road is open. It is lit by the hard lessons of our own history and the brighter lights of our capabilities today. Take it, and let the river that runs through a capital be the place where our columns stop—not because we could not go further, but because we no longer need to. On the banks of the Tigris, we should dictate terms. Then we should come home.
There is a whisper going around the cautious salons of Washington: “What if Baghdad is too far?” I answer with a map and a watch. Kuwait City to Baghdad is not the moon. In the jet age, distance is a political excuse, not a military fact. No Arabian desert can stop our people. We have the machines, the doctrine, and the men for a single, thunderous, compassionate war of hours.
Lay the map flat and trace the arteries. You do not need to carve a canyon; you follow the wadis and highways that have been carrying diesel and conscripts south for months. The very roads by which the aggressor projected force are the roads by which he will learn humility. Where the pavement is useful we use it; where it is not, the desert itself is our maneuver space—hardpan, flats, and long sightlines that favor gunnery and initiative. There are no hedgerows here to ambush competence. There is sky enough for AWACS to see, room enough for tank battalions to breathe, and straight lines enough for artillery to speak fluently.
Now the watch. In the first hours the air kills ideas—radars, relays, and the habit of giving orders without fear of interruption. The second hand sweeps and engineers are already up on the berms with line charges and blades, smoking gaps into being. The minute hand clicks again and armored spearheads pass the tape as if it were a starting gun. They do not “advance” as if pushing a stalled wagon; they transit—operating by march tables, fuel plans, and rehearsed battle drills. Helicopters do not range aimlessly; they hop node to node through forward arming and refueling points that appear like stagecraft where yesterday there was emptiness. Tankers are airborne to feed the strike packages; HEMTTs and DROPS trucks churn forward to feed the brigades. The enemy counts kilometers; we count evolutions.
Distance is a logistics problem, and logistics is where English-speaking armies stop arguing and get to work. We will not ask a rifleman to outrun a fuel bladder. The plan is older than the latest gadget and better than bravado: echelon sustainment. Preposition bulk fuel at desert lily pads. Push forward repair teams who treat a thrown track like a spilled cup of coffee—annoying, not existential. Keep traffic discipline so that every road is two roads—the one you are on and the one behind you that you keep clear. We learned this in Germany’s winters and Arizona’s summers; our cousins learned it in Salisbury’s rains and the North German Plain’s mud. The desert will not humble us. It will simplify our choices.
“But the river,” the careful say, reducing the campaign to one blue line and a shrug. Rivers are not walls; they are decision points. Bridges are either seized intact by speed and surprise, or denied and replaced by engineers who measure spans by the calendar of hours, not the almanac of months. The city beyond a river is not a maze; it is a set of systems—power, water, roads, police—that obey the same iron laws as everywhere else: isolate them and they comply, threaten them and they hide, secure them and they help you. We need not bayonet every doorway to break a capital’s will. We need only make movement inside it feel futile and relief from outside it feel imaginary.
“What of weather?” Sand and wind are the oldest arguments of cowards. Weather punishes the untrained; it inconveniences professionals. Night vision does not blink in a sirocco. GPS is not offended by haze. Filters keep turbines drinking and crews breathing. And if a sandstorm grounds a sortie, armored columns own the day that follows; if it stalls a column, fighters take the night back on the hour. A combined-arms team is a pendulum—when one weight slows, the other swings. The opponent has no such clock; he has only pauses that turn into doubts.
The true obstacle is not distance but indecision. The moment a force this capable pauses for approval between pulses, it teaches the enemy to improvise. We must deny him that lesson. Keep the pressure elastic and relentless: find, fix, finish; then roll the net forward and do it again. Bypass villages where a white bedsheet in a window is truer than any spokesman; mark safe lanes and safe hours for surrendering soldiers; broadcast on frequencies they have known since conscript school how to live to see morning—walk, hands high, toward the lighted vehicles; lay down rifles; water and food will be issued. Compassion at speed is not a contradiction. It is the point.
And what of “too far” for the home front? The American people can read a clock. They know the difference between a war of policy and a war of attrition. If the plan is coherent—liberate, disarm, pursue the means of renewed aggression until they are unrecoverable—and if our generals are permitted to execute that plan as written, the public will absorb the shock and exhale at the result. The British public understands this music as well: a grim overture, a violent crescendo, and then silence. What they will not forgive—what none of us should—is a conductor who stops the orchestra two bars before the resolution and calls it prudence.
Baghdad is not “far”; it is the place where this ends cleanly. To halt short is to choose an aftertaste of patrol bases and artillery ranges, to let the aggressor nurse his pride with the fiction of survival. To drive to the river and make surrender a municipal function—orderly, supervised, swift—is to compress the horror into the smallest possible window and then close it. That is the moral economy of force. The watch understands it; the map confirms it.
So let the salons whisper. We will answer with dust plumes on the horizon that move in formation, with bridges taken before their charges are wired, with road junctions controlled by lieutenants who look too young to be so calm, with loudspeakers that list grid coordinates where water and mercy are found. The hour hand will barely move; the minute hand will tell the tale. “Too far” will become yesterday’s worry, and the river that once seemed a limit will become a line of punctuation—a period, not a comma—at the end of a just war conducted in the only humane way left to modern nations: quickly.
“Come now,” say the respectable on Sunday shows, “no one captures a capital in hours.” That is a 20th-century sentence in need of a 21st-century correction. Consider five facts:
Preparation is victory disguised as waiting. Six months of build-up is not dithering; it is loading a spring. We have not merely massed divisions—we have rehearsed logistics, surveyed lanes, harmonized radios, and taught our young captains how to make decisions without asking permission. A modern American major is a Patton in miniature with better maps.
Morale is a weapon. The Iraqi Army’s conscripts aren’t ideologues; they are survivors. Their officers are political men with pistols and phones. When those phones go dead and the pistols feel small, they will choose the timeless military option: the white cloth. We must make surrender easy and immediate. Loudspeakers, leaflets, clear directions to collection points, and the good name of Anglo-American honor will do more than an extra bombardment hour.
Technology is leverage, not a crutch. We should not worship gadgets; we should marry them to doctrine. GPS is not a parlor trick; it is the difference between hesitation and a fixed bayonet at the right intersection. Thermal sights mean night is our friend. In a contest between men who can see and men who cannot, the seers win before they shoot.
British steel, American weight. The U.K. brings something irreplaceable to the fight: regimental culture that treats chaos like bad weather, and gunnery that is scripture. The U.S. brings depth—of fuel, food, spare parts, and infantry who can read a map and a moral sentence. Together this is not addition, it is multiplication.
Politics ends when the first track rolls. The only force that can slow an army like ours is an office. Once H-Hour arrives, the questions that clogged hearings will have answers written in dust and exhaust. The home front can either savor a short war or foot the bill for a long one. Let us present the nation with the bill it prefers.
Below is the plan as it ought to be—not because it is flashy, but because it is fast.
The Arrow Plan: H-Hour to H+18
H-Hour (0400, local)
Precision strikes blind the Iraqi radar grid. The “left hand” (U.S. Army VII Corps) and the “right hand” (U.K. 1st Armoured Division, reinforced by U.S. Marines) move simultaneously, like the prongs of an arrow opening desert space. Long-range artillery and MLRS harvest the first line of entrenched Iraqi formations before they can exhale their morning breath.
H+3
Air cavalry and scouts mark the lanes; engineers knife through the berms like zipper teeth opening. Coalition psychologists imagine the Iraqi conscripts as chess pieces; they are not. They are exhausted, underpaid men who have heard the thunder for weeks. When the earth shakes and the sky tears, most will choose life. Our loudspeakers, leaflets, and common sense all say the same word: Surrender.
H+6
The Arrow narrows. U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps conducts vertical envelopment of Euphrates crossings west of Basra, while British Challenger squadrons—desert-tuned, meticulously maintained—outrun their reputations. I do not romanticize armor: it is fuel and fire control and training and will. The British, who invented the tank, have all four. When their gunners lay reticles on steel, they will pluck Republican Guard teeth like piano keys.
H+9
“Baghdad by breakfast” begins to pass from rhetoric to timetable. U.S. heavy corps churn north along pre-surveyed lanes screened by attack helicopters. Tactical air (the trusty A-10s, the F-15Es, the RAF Tornados that have been so slandered by the faint-hearted) becomes the shepherd dog pushing a frightened flock—only here the flock is armored and the dog bites.
H+12
Royal Marines seize the Fao Peninsula as a matter of prudence and pride—because the maritime door should be bolted from the outside while the door to Baghdad is kicked from the inside. Across the belt of southern Iraq, we create a moving geometry that the Iraqi General Staff cannot solve. The solution is surrender; the alternative is irrelevance.
H+15
The Arrow becomes a spear. American Abrams and British Challengers, tankers wired awake by coffee, discipline, and the knowledge that history loves the swift, pierce the last organized belt before the capital. Bridges are seized, or if felled, replaced by the ingenuity of our engineers and rotors. A river crossing in 1991 is not Remagen in 1945; it is an industrial act performed by specialists in hours.
H+18
Baghdad’s ring roads are not sacred geometry. They are pavement. Pavement yields to treads. Republican Guard units that pride themselves on fealty to a single mustache will find that fealty cannot stop depleted-uranium darts. Government ministries are not fortresses; they are addresses. We will visit them.
By the time this magazine reaches you, the hour may be upon us. Some will still counsel “measured responses,” as though a burglar responds to a homeowner’s measuring tape. Some will warn of “quagmires,” as though quicksand waits on every map coordinate. We can be forgiven for not taking strategic advice from the same class of men who cannot change a tire without convening a task force.
We Americans are often accused of loving speed for its own sake. Guilty. We do. It is part of our national grammar to get on with it. The British are accused of loving understatement. Also guilty. “Got on with it,” they say afterward, and everyone knows something serious has occurred. Put those grammars together and you have a sentence fit for this moment and this enemy.
Let the sentence be short. Let it be true. Let it end in Baghdad.
—KW