April 18, 2003

Michael Kelly's last article for The Atlantic is up. When he's not deriding the people who disagree with him as appeasers and baathist-sympathizers, the article seems almost poignant. In his valedictory, he writes
On the whole, I'd say, the phoniness quotient is down this time. We are spared, at least, much of the death-and-destruction-and-quagmire talk that preceded the last conflict here. The lessons of the campaign in Afghanistan, adding to the lessons of the campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia, have sunk in. The U.S. armed forces enjoy a technological superiority like nothing the world has seen before; they are, in a real sense, not even fighting the same war as their opponents—or in the same century. No one argues much now about whether these forces are capable of crushing even very serious opposition, and almost no one argues that Iraq offers serious opposition.
Alas, poor Mary McGregor....

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