[Col.] McPhee [CO of the task force, apparently] saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone."

One thing analysts must reconsider, [an unnamed Defense Intelligence Agency officer] said, is: "What was the nature of the threat?"

So, in other words, now that we've defeated Iraq, we need to figure out why it is that we attacked in the first place.