corrente

Lambert notes below an excerpt from "The secret Downing Street memo" - see entire post below: Whack: It's not like we didn't notice at the time:

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

And then [Lambert] adds:

Generous of the Iraqis, what? But wait... Why is the Gulf of Tonkin coming into my mind? Or the Nazi invasion of Poland... Give me a minute, I'll get it...

Or, The Battle of Britian...?

Which, in turn, reminded me of the following exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and PBS's Jim Lehrer (NewsHour, February 4, 2002) in which Field Marshal von Rumsfeld shares his thoughts on the human resource economics of lightning war.

JIM LEHRER: But if somebody were to look at this budget - forget the money for a while - just look at what it buys, does it buy anything that different than what we already have?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I think when you say "that different," it's important to understand that you can - when the Germans transformed their armed forces into the Blitzkrieg, they transformed only about 5 or 10 percent of their force. Everything else was the same, but they transformed the way they used it, the connectivity between aircraft and forces on the ground, the concentration of it in a specific portion of the line, and it - one would not want to transform 100 percent of your forces. You only need to transform a portion.

Presumably transforming a portion of yourself into Hermann Goering is a grand idea too. Jeezis. "The Secret Downing Street memo," (IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING) is dated "23 JULY", 2002.

NewsHour transcript, Feb 4, 2002.

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