Q. What Happens When You Delay an Urban Offensive in Order to Placate Domestic Concerns During Election Season, Thereby Telegraphing Your Intentions to Such an Extent that Western Union Can't Dare to Compete?

A. Insurgents Leave the City You're Attacking, and Counterattack Elsewhere.

Another from the Times, this being, in contrast to the Sunshine News below, the "Duh" segment:

A rebel counteroffensive roiled central and northern Iraq today, with guerillas storming police stations and setting oil wells ablaze, as American troops tried to flush the remaining insurgents from the debris-strewn cityscape of Falluja.

Tanks and fighting vehicles had smashed through the southern Falluja neighborhood of Shuhada, the last major rebel stronghold in the city, on Sunday. But a die-hard band of the insurgents hid in some of the houses and other shelters at the furthest southern edge of Shuhada and emerged this morning, after the tanks had left, setting off a five-hour gun battle when ground troops arrived.

The wave of guerilla assaults rolled across the Sunni triangle, with the sharpest surge in violence coming in the morning in Baquba, 35 miles northwest of the capital. There, insurgents laid siege to a police station downtown and to one in a southern suburb.

Note that Fallujah is now back to "not quite liberated," a change from this morning (at one point Google News had an article describing the "liberation" of Fallujah (from The Washington Post, I think) just above a European press piece (The Guardian? Damnit--I didn't take a screen shot) describing ongoing fighting.

But the Times story makes it clear--even though they never admit it--that insurgents for the most part didn't stupidly hang around in Fallujah and face certain death. They moved out during the pre-election delay, and now that the US Army has committed a large contingent of soldiers THERE, the resistance has gone elsewhere. Duh.

Now, the truly frightening thing to consider is that instead of realizing the tactical error (the whole strategic bungling notwithstanding), I fear Team Bush could simply up the ante, i.e., give up on their false concern for "the Iraqi people" and call in the B-52 strikes. If they do that, my own take would be that Osama isn't hiding in Pakistan--he's holed up in the basement of the White House somewhere, because that would be like Christmas every day for that son of a bitch.

And Santa Bush apparently thinks he's been a VERY good boy...

Damn, I could do a Dean scream.