The Bumpy Road to Baghdad: The Hard Fighting Leads to Political Reverberations at Home and Abroad

Transcript

MR. MICHAEL E. O'HANLON: I just wanted to set the stage with a couple of broad comments on the military campaign and the overall theme of my opening remarks is that we need to continue to maintain a balanced view, and those of us in the punditry and in the scholar and in the media communities have not been all that distinguished in our ability to do this in the first two weeks of the conflict. I've tried to be an optimist by comparison to a lot of last week's discussion in thinking the basic contours of the strategy have been found. I wrote a couple of pieces along those lines last week.

I remain an optimist but I also think we all know that one better still be a little bit nervous about the looming potential of our battle for Baghdad which is more than a potential battle, it's a very likely battle. And even as we see Republican Guard units being decisively beaten on the outskirts of Baghdad, we also hear troubling indicators of many units moving into the city. This may actually come back to really haunt U.S.-Turkish relations if it appears that a number of divisions that were initially north of Baghdad now have an easier time getting into the city because there is no northern approach to this invasion effort and this [blight effect] being put onto Baghdad. So it's far too early to claim that things are going to be a cakewalk from this point on, but certainly the last couple of days have been very good news and reaffirm I think the argument that I felt relatively lonely in making last week that things were still going pretty well.

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