(1) Opening Kickoff
It’s 1 pm on Sunday as I write this, and it looks like everything is in place for the opening kickoff:

A U.S.-Iraqi campaign to stabilize Baghdad will begin soon and the offensive against militants will be on a scale never seen during four years of war, American officers said on Sunday.

Briefing a small group of foreign reporters, three American colonels who are senior advisers to the Iraqi army and police in Baghdad said a command center overseeing the crackdown would be activated on Monday.

“The expectation is the plan will be implemented soon thereafter,” Colonel Doug Heckman, senior adviser to the 9th Iraqi Army division, said at a U.S. military base in Baghdad.

“It’s going to be an operation unlike anything this city has seen. It’s a multiple order magnitude of difference, not just a 30 percent, I mean a couple hundred percent,” he added, referring to previous offensives that failed to stem bloodshed.

The plan will involve U.S. and Iraqi forces sweeping the capital’s neighborhoods for militants and illegal weapons and then holding cleared areas.

A fair question at this point would be to ask why the scale of this operation will be 200% larger than before. After all, we’ve had the same “clear, hold and build” strategy before, and we’ve had the same number of troops in Baghdad before. So what were we doing before, holding back?

Ah, but the clever American colonels have anticipated snarky questions from those who would seek to embolden the enemy, and invite carnage on the United States of America:

All three officers sought to talk up the ability of Iraq’s forces to perform better than in previous crackdowns.

However, that just raises other questions. We are now launching an operation at least three times the scale of previous “clear, hold and build” operations because we think Iraq’s forces are ready to perform. The success of the operation will depend entirely on whether that thinking has any basis in fact. So why exactly did we need 21,500 additional combat troops in Iraq, plus an untold number of support troops? Did Bush order them into harm’s way just to show that he could—that no matter who won the midterm elections and no matter how much the American public disses him in polls, he’s still the bloody boss, and strong enough to do exactly what he wants, no matter how unpopular, no matter how unnecessary, and that includes getting American soldiers killed?

After all, Operation Try Try And Try Again is going to be launched early next week. And not many of those 21,500 troops are even in place yet. And presumably those that are, are still trying to scrounge equipment from somewhere.

(2) Final Whistle

“The end of the summer is when we should see some concrete results and be able to say is this working or not,” Heckman said. That would be around September.

Heck, no! Heckman’s instructions may be not to say whether “this” is working or not till the end of the summer. But we’ll know within a week or two, won’t we? Everything depends on whether a) the Iraqi forces show up this time, b) they are indeed ready to perform, and c) their bosses are ready to take on the Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr. And it won’t take more than a week or two for all of those things to be crystal clear.

*** Update 9:40 am ***

What do you know? Here’s something totally unexpected: the truth may not be quite what the three American colonels were putting out in Baghdad on Sunday. Here’s the NYT:

… concerns emerged Sunday about the readiness of Iraqi military units that are supposed to work with the roughly 17,000 additional American soldiers who will be stationed in Baghdad under the plan, which President Bush announced last month.

Iraqi and American military officials said the command structure of the Iraqi side had still not been resolved, although the plan is supposed to move forward this coming week.

Naeem al-Kabbi, the deputy mayor of Baghdad and a senior official loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the powerful cleric who heads the Mahdi Army, said he believed the plan had been delayed “because the Iraqi Army is not ready.”

American military officials have not laid out a precise timeline for the security plan, and would not say if undermanned Iraqi units had delayed its start. But American officials have said Iraqi units arriving in Baghdad to fulfill their part of the new plan are only at 55 to 60 percent of their full strength.

So they are allowed to say the units are severely undermanned, but they’re not allowed to say that the start of the operation has been delayed? Or they’re just not allowed to explain what has delayed the start?

And the fact that these units are only at “55 to 60 percent of their full strength” was previously unknown to us? Instead of putting his money into officers with Ph.D.s, maybe Gen. Petraeus should first invest in bean counters armed with clickers, one to be attached to each Iraqi unit?