Iraq Attack Finds Lack of Slack

So it’s definitely seeming more and more unlikely that an attack on Iraq will come anytime soon. This article says Afghanistan exhausted critical munitions supplies, and the Pentagon lacks the 200,000 US troops required:

Pentagon planners say it will take six months to produce enough Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), the precision systems that guided 1,000-pound bombs to Taliban and al Qaeda targets, to contemplate an attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq … Former Pentagon officials in touch with current planners say as many as 200,000 U.S. ground troops may be needed. By comparison, 60,000 U.S. military personnel are in the Central Command region — 4,000 of them on the ground in Afghanistan.

And even if they get these supplies, bringing down Saddam Hussein is unlikely to be as easy or come with as few US casualties as fighting deluded stone-age religious nutters in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan:

The Iraqi regime is also much stronger than the Taliban was. The Taliban fielded perhaps 45,000 troops, while Iraq has armed forces totaling 400,000 … By early March 1991, the Iraqi armed forces had been reduced to a shadow of their former selves. Yet weak as they were, they still had enough strength to crush the largest insurrections in Iraqi history and keep Saddam in power. Those who favor the Afghan approach against Iraq are therefore betting that a U.S. military effort significantly smaller than the one mounted in 1991 would somehow produce much greater results this time around … The key Iraqi divisions never broke and fought hard, although not particularly well, during the coalition’s subsequent ground offensive … Once an Afghan-style air campaign began, Saddam would have every incentive to crush the Kurds. Since America’s ability to defend them without ground forces is extremely limited, it has relied on deterrence — the threat of a massive air campaign — instead. If such an air campaign is going on anyway, that threat will no longer work, and Saddam would likely move to reoccupy the north — with all of the attendant slaughter and repression that would entail.