There's no other place on Earth like this. Not North Korea or Syria or Iran or Mexico or Indonesia. Not Russia or China or Phillipines. This is a regime bolstered by institutions of terror and significant resources that perfected their tactics and threat capability for 30 years. They've exploited cynical international political and diplomatic cover. They operate absent any larger State survival interest, and thus are without all hurdles to the use of mass destruction weaponry and strategic civilian slaughter. We needed to seize and occupy this territory, and kill the murderers who threaten everyone and everything.
Going forward, it's going to be about CIA street assets, Spec Ops targeting precision Air Force and Naval Air assaults, Airborne and Marine quick strike units with light artillery and armor designed to destroy enemy terror cells in heavily populated 3rd World urban centers and undeveloped and rugged wastelands.
This is the last time we're lining up like this. We couldn't possibly afford to wait for the Heavy Armor like the Wesley Clarks and Hugh Sheltons demanded, we'd still be waiting in Kuwait City for the 4th ID to stage their parade and the Hussein boys would have fortified their command and the Fedayeen Saddam and Al Qaida/Hizbollah hitmen would be entrenched and everywhere.
The journalists won't have the forewarning or long-term stories to springboard from in our future military operations. They're going to have to get the news of our projection of military prerogatives straight from the fiction writers at Reuters, Al Jazeera, New York Times and the BBC. We didn't nip Saddam in the bud when we should have. Future Saddam's are non-starters.
Baghdad still is frought with peril and deadly risk but .... now about that Pyongyang cancer ...