While the press is, rather predictably, playing up the "worrisome escalation" angle of yesterday's big ambush attacks, there are several things they're missing:

• The regular army isn't very big on subtlety or subterfuge. In other words, when it comes to ops planning they have the reputation of being as imaginative and subtle as a cast iron skillet. So, let's for the moment posit that this whole thing wasn't some massive, extremely clever setup. This means the CPA has been penetrated, and probably pretty deeply. Convoys filled with currency don't have swinging yellow "Billions On Board" signs attached to them. Someone dropped a dime on this one.

  The co-ordination was just too good. Sure, a convoy filled with APCs and M-1s guarding a few 5-tons fairly screams "ambush me!" But you can't co-ordinate three different nearly simultaneous attacks with a cell-style guerilla unit structure. It takes time, and quite a bit of it, to get everyone in position, trained and tasked. They've got leaks, serious ones, and need to find them.

• They almost certainly didn't bag 50-plus insurgents. On average, for every dead combatant there will be two wounded (in other words, usually 1/3rd of all combat casualties are deaths, the rest are wounded), and it's very unlikely the good guys managed to wound everyone, which is what would be required for the numbers to add up. Expect a lot of Monday-morning-quarterbacking by the press monkeys brave enough to actually leave the Palestine hotel for a few hours.
• They did kill some of them, and almost certainly wounded many more. At the cost of zero dead and eight wounded. This is about as one-sided as it can get.We won this one.
• In spite of the trumpeted co-ordination, there was a remarkable lack of heavy weapons. Shooting AK-47s and RPGs at an M-1 Abrams, even the ass of an M-1 Abrams, is like lobbing spitballs at Steve Austin. You need recoilless rifles, big mortars, and wire-guided missiles before these things even start paying attention to you. They had what must have been at least a week of preparation, and still couldn't field these critical items.
• Even without them, the insurgents stood up and fought. Every guerilla doctrine from the Wascones to chairman Mao states you sneak up on the enemy, hit him on the back of the head as hard as you can, and then run like hell if he turns around. We turned around, but they didn't run. We had tanks and they didn't run.

  This means they were stupid, arrogant, or very, very desperate. You just don't attack prepared regular army units with partisans, not if you want keep them from being noisily turned into worm food. Trained officers, even ones as badly trained as those who riddled Saddam's army, know this. These men were sacrificed in a gamble that didn't pay off. They bluffed us with aces and eights when we were showing four cards of a straight flush.

• They took the chance anyway because we are winning. The "old" Iraqi Dinars, which it would be fair to assume the guerrillas have aplenty, expire this month (according to NBC news at least). Always remember guerrillas operate on the fringes... they beg, borrow, steal, or buy what they need or they (literally) starve and die. If the CPA really were running around with their thumbs stuffed so far up their asses they could pick boogers then the "new" Dinars would be taken about as seriously as Michael Jackson's claims of "innocent" sleepovers.

  Instead, the new money is being taken so seriously the opposition was willing to show just how co-ordinated it could get just to knock over a few trucks full of it. This is the kind of co-ordination you use only when you have the chance to shove a bullet in Bremer's ear. If it were a simple feint they would never have come near this convoy. Instead they threw everything they had at it, and had their heads handed to them.

We're not perfect over there. I think we're still probably screwing up at least as often as we're getting it right. But this was not a screwup, at least not on our part. The good guys won this one.

And if you don't think we're the good guys, please don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.