Military expert and occasional NR contributor John Hillen’s quick take:
“We took about 48 hours, because we thought maybe we could end it by
decapitating them. We looked around for someone to bargain with,
something we’ll read about in the next Woodward book. That experimental
stage to see if we could get peace with one bullet has ended, and now
we’re doing what would, in the original plan, done on the first night.
It was a risk worth taking, and who knows, we might have gotten Saddam
anyway.”