After

When Charles X, the last Bourbon king of France, was faced with the revolution that would topple him, he declared that he saw no alternative to the throne but the scaffold. Talleyrand, the aged diplomat, told him, “Your majesty forgets the post-chaise”—a carriage-ride to exile. At an early March meeting of the Arab League, some of the attendees offered Talleyrand’s advice to Saddam Hussein, whose flunkeys indignantly rejected it. Unless he changes his mind, he will face the scaffold of the battlefield.

The broad outlines of America’s war strategy, discussed by Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post and others, seem clear. Precision-guided weapons, which have become more precise since the Gulf War, will be directed against the regime’s arsenal and its hierarchy. (No bombing is precise enough to spare civilian casualties, and anti-American media, from CNN International to al-Jazeera, will feast on the innocents who suffer.)