Catching Saddam

Josh Marshall reports that Republican Senator Ray LaHood from Illinois is claiming that we are "this close" to bagging Saddam, and that he knows something that we don't.

Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it. It's not like this hasn't happened before. Republicans have tried to report that we're "this close" to various breakthroughs in Iraq, and they have always amounted to nothing. Take, for example, Republican Senators in July claiming that we had found "solid evidence" of WMD in Iraq, just wait and see. We waited and saw. Nothing. Then, a bit more than a month later, right-wing pundit Bob Novak assured us that we had proof of WMD, and Bush was just waiting till mid-September when he had even more info and could wow us all the more. Guess what. Nothing, squared.

So I am not too optimistic here. In related news, CNN reported that Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam's right-hand man, was captured--but they withdrew the story, and just a few minutes ago, the story broke that we don't have him. I think people's desire to see progress in Iraq is making them a bit too quick to assume that something is about to happen there--aside from the inevitable downward slide into an even stickier quagmire as a bad situation steadily becomes far, far worse.