Holy Shiite!

Brigadier Nick Carter (no, not that Nick Carter; and not that one, either!), the commander of British troops in Southern Iraq, has told the press this weekend that if the local Shia authorities in Basra asked the Coalition to leave, he would have no choice but to withdraw from that city. Imagine that - actually respecting the wishes of the people you'd liberated! Aside from the night-and-day contrast between the Anglo and American approaches to occupation that this admission highlights, it also shows how tenuous the Coalition's position is in most of Iraq. Thanks to a Secretary of Defense more interested than proving his pet thesis that the United States could win wars both on the fly and on the cheap - and failing at that, as it turned out - than doing his job, our troops are spread so thin that a nation-wide insurrection could spell disaster, and the Iraqis now seem to know this. No wonder we're treading so carefully in Fallujah and Najaf, where our previous efforts to take care of some radical elements provoked a shitstorm of widespread resistance that seemed once more to catch the architects of this ill-conceived war off-guard. Is there anything that Rumsfeld and Company has actually gotten right?

About a year and a half ago I compared this runup to war to the Sicilian Expedition, an attempt by the Athenians to seize the resource-rich island of Sicily on a bogus pretext that lead to a spectacular military defeat and tipped the balance of power in Greece towards Sparta, against whom Athens had been waging a decades-long conflict. By allowing themselves to be suckered into a war of choice, the Athenian people were distracted from the clear and present danger represented by the Spartans, and soon after the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, Athens lost both the Peloponnesian War and its Empire, never again regaining the primacy it had enjoyed during the Age of Pericles. At the time I had made the comparison, it was not yet clear how things were going to turn out, but the more time goes by the more and more this historical analogy seems right on the mark. So much so that whereas back in the Fall of 2002 I only saw one or two other people making the connection (to his credit I believe Senator Byrd said as much in a speech before Congress), now it's all over the blogosphere.

I may just have to revisit the matter. Now, where did I put my copy of Thucydides?