I truly enjoy Michael Ledeen, who brings so much to the table. I would say that I swallow whole nearly everything he writes, except that I find myself biting into every word by re-reading each of his articles several times. I parse everything. I remember and come back to articles weeks or months later and each article holds up over time. (OK, OBL does not appear to be dead, as ML has suggested. But other than that …) Ledeen is almost an obsession with me. With one very important exception – I almost never make the leap to his signature line, “faster, please.” If this is to be a decades long war of attrition, what evidence do I glean from this article that the US should speed up? What indicates that time is more on their side than ours? What in ML’s text should make me more impatient than I already was? In fact, what I conclude here is that it is the mullahs who are increasingly desperate, both individually and as a group. I sense that time is on our side rather than theirs. The President recently suggested that 3.5 years into the war we are still taking out 3,000 terrorists/month just in Iraq. (Call that “throughput.”) If there are an average of, say, 30,000 terrorists in Iraq at any one time (“inventory”), then by Little’s Law the average life expectancy (“flow time”) of a new terrorist can be measured in weeks or at most months. Simple arithmetic says that the US has killed hundreds of thousands of terrorists in Iraq (3K per month times many months), to which we can add Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, etc., and terrorist-on-terrorist casualties, as well. Like shooting fish in a barrel. I suspect that we are positively routing these bastards. If the mullahs are gracious enough to pack their terrorists up and send them to Iraq for us to kill them, why make the trek to Iran? Why open another front? I know this is politically incorrect, but why not just sit back and wait for them to line up and be killed? Except for the whole nuclear bomb thing, why should we be in any hurry?

ML: Why don’t you think Osama is dead? Have you seen him recently? I think he’s probably dead…we’re now headed towards three years since the last video.