Sitzkrieg - The Democrats that

Sitzkrieg - The Democrats that aren't kvetching about going to war, are busy kvetching about how long it's taking Bush to get the war underway.

As is frequently the case when talking about defense issues, Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless has the most spot-on analysis I've seen on the blogophere - and, ergo, in the media period:

For instance, many have wondered why it was that it's taken so long to prepare for war. Likely it will be years before we truly find out, but among other things it appears that there were certain logistical necessities which couldn't be prepared before now. For instance, more than a year ago it became clear that we couldn't rely on the Saudis, and that meant we couldn't depend on using the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't just that the runways would not be available to us for airstrikes; it was that our regional military command center was located there. Starting about a year ago, we picked up and moved, and built up the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar into an alternative command center. That only became operational in December, and General Franks and his staff have spent the last month shaking it out and making sure everything works correctly.

Another problem was that we had run through a substantial percentage (probably more than half) of our stockpile of precision guided munitions in Afghanistan, and we were not producing them at a wartime rate. It takes a long time to ramp up production of this kind of thing, because the manufacturing pipeline is extremely long for modern high-tech weapons. And even after the higher rate finally emerged from the back end of the pipe, it was necessary to wait for our stockpiles to build back up. But that's happened now, and we again have a lot of JDAMs and Tomahawks and the rate of production is much higher now.

And though we are capable of fighting nearly anywhere, in almost any kind of conditions, there are some which are better than others and favor us more. It turns out that February and March are the best months in which to fight a war in that region because of the weather and the climate (as Donald Sensing pointed out last August). It's no accident that the last Gulf war ground action was also at this time of year.

The point is that what looks from the outside like dithering and stalling may simply represent unglamorous but critical hidden progress.

There probably were other issues involved, some of which we may not learn about for decades. If we'd ignored those things and gone in earlier, we certainly could have won – but it might have been an extremely ugly victory, one which was more politically damaging than politically useful. Remember that the point of war is to advance your political goal; you don't fight wars just because you're pissed at someone. (Not if you're intelligent, you don't.)