I just got back from a briefing from what we might call — with a nod to the Civil War lexicon — the Army of the Potomac. That is, the 
key regime-change boosters from the DC foreign policy establishment. This morning at the American Enterprise Institute, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and James Woolsey gave a briefing on the progress of the war. I’m going to write more about this later this evening. But I thought I’d write a little now from my filing station here at Starbucks just to give my first impressions.
There was a definitely a sense that things weren’t going as well as had been expected. But 
the general tenor of the presentations was ‘Let’s wait and see; we never said it would be easy, etc.’
To the extent there was any second-guessing it was from Ledeen, who said it was a bad idea to have “made the battle for Iraq almost entirely a military battle when there were so many political elements operating in our favor…” This is something we may be hearing a lot more of — basically, the neos saying we should have taken the US military-cum-‘Iraqi opposition’ approach.
There was some discussion of the much broader conflict or war of which Iraq is supposed to be only the first battle. But of that, more later.
