WE'RE WINNING

Ignore the ravings of Josh Marshall & co for a while and look at a few facts about the war. To date, we have 300,000 troops in theatre and another division on the way in, and have suffered fewer than 100 fatalities while setting ourselves up within range of the enemy capital. We have systematically destroyed all visible symbols of Saddam Hussein's power throughout Baghdad that we can reach by air--his government buildings, his palaces, his hideouts and bunkers--gone or nearly so. On the ground elsewhere in Iraq, we're ripping down all those egocentric murals depicting Saddam in various states of power, and we'll soon do the same in Baghdad. In the south of Iraq, the people are slowly starting to turn our way as they see that we're in this thing to the end.

Our special ops troops, as you no doubt have heard, staged an incredible rescue and recovered PFC Jessica Lynch of the 507th today. While Democrats carped and the press fumed and armchair generals fussed that the whole thing was going to pot, our leaders and troops carefully and methodically rescued on of our own and will bring her back home alive. After this, she'll make one heck of a kindergarten teacher. Can you imagine what she'll do to some principal who stands in the way of her giving her kids a proper education? I might move into her district, just to have her teach my kid.

And do you know what kind of information it took to make this rescue raid possible? No doubt we used air surveillance and may have had our own operatives on the ground looking for the missing and imprisoned soldiers, but it's likely that one or more of the high ranking officers we have recently turned or captured provided the key piece of information we needed to be able to flip the switch on this operation. To get that information in a timely manner took skill; to accomplish the mission successfully took courage.

How many of the 10,000 or so Iraqi POWs have been "rescued" by their government? How many of them would want to be? How many allied officers have fallen into enemy hands and given up useful information? We're winning.

As I write this, there's a huge battle underway south of Baghdad in the town of Karbala. It appears to be the largest clash to date, and will probably spell the end of a couple of Republican Guard divisions. Those same units have been pounded from the air for a couple of weeks now, to the point that they're degraded down to 50% or less of their original strength. So if they started out with, say, 20,000 men, they now have around 10,000 that are still capable of fighting.

And how many have we lost so far? About 70, give or take a couple. And we just got one of those back tonight. We're winning.

Meanwhile, far away in those countries that are truly going to reap the benefits of this war on the cheap, French cretins defaced a monument to the British who died saving France from Germany the first time. There was a second time, in the 1940s, and Britons and Americans answered the alarm and saved France from German aggression and French cowardice. But since 54% of Britons now see the French as something other than a close ally, the likelihood of there being a third time is remote. What am I saying? There already is a third time--we're saving France now, along with the rest of the West, from nuclear-armed terrorism. So, what about the time after this one? Next time, if the threat to France isn't a threat to us, we should let France sink. We won't, but we should.

By the way, one in three Frenchmen wants Saddam to win this war. And about 80% of Russians agree with them. But never mind them. They really don't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

Egypt seems to have figured out which way the wind is blowing. It tossed out Iraq's chief diplomat today without specifying a reason. Jordan has already kicked out all of Iraq's "diplomats." Iraq's Arab bretheren are starting, once again, to collectively treat Saddam as the black sheep of the family. They know the game is almost over for him.

And they know we're winning.