WAR PLAN ORANGE

The Belmont Club is an excellent site for insightful analysis of the war, with lots of historical allusions and links to other analyses. This post compares the insurgency in Iraq with the original plan devised by the US Army to defend the Philippines against Japanese attack in the late 1930s. War Plan Orange called for the US and Philippine forces to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula and hold out until relieved by superior forces from the states. MacArthur didn't have the resources to pull it off in December of 1941 and he made things worse by discarding the plan when the Japanese attacked initially, only to go back to it after he'd lost a tremendous amount of what supplies he had. Did Saddam and his generals create a plan to release all the criminals, seed the populace with special Republican Guards and Saddam Fedayeen, disperse the armaments (primarily in Sunni areas), ship WMD to Syria, and encourage looting and disorder? It makes sense.