NICK DENTON WRITES: Don’t take Baghdad — just partition Iraq. Sure, the Turks and the Saudis and the Iranians won’t like it — but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

I don’t actually favor Nick’s approach. But it does illustrate an important point: Saddam has Baghdad, but we’ve got all the parts of Iraq that we care about already — all the places that have oil, or from which he can threaten surrounding countries with missiles, etc. What’s more, every day we’ve got more soldiers and more materiel in place, and he’s got fewer soldiers and less materiel. Saddam thinks that time’s on his side, but it’s not.