I suppose that I should be happy to hear that the President has a plan for what happens after we win the war against Iraq and have deposed Saddam Hussein. [article] Now, I just wish we had a plan for how to win the war -- according to some reports, in contrast to the last Gulf War, which lasted all of 100 hours, a new Gulf War would be fought house to house in the streets of Baghdad, and could get ugly. [article]

In this regard, the Bush Administration has made references to the Iraqi "street", and how, once freed from the tyrrany of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people (or, at least, a well-armed subset thereof) will join the opposition parties fighting alongside the U.S. against Saddam. While I have no knowledge of whether this is true or not, I suspect that it is less true than the President would like to believe; rumors of Saddam's demise have, up to now, been markedly premature. For a thoughtful exposition on this subject, check out Ofra Bengio's July/August 2000 article in Foreign Affairs on the resilience of Saddam Hussein. [article]