OK. Looks like the March 1 war timetable fer shootin’ is slip­ping thanks to those pesky French and Turk­ish demands to see some ID with Pres­i­dent Bush’s check(s). It’s now look­ing more and more like March 15 or so, as George over at War­blog­ging argued.
National Secu­rity Adviser Con­doleeza Rice appar­ently agrees, say­ing that Bush is “will­ing to wait until Hans Blix, one of two United Nations chief weapons inspec­tors, reports on Iraqi com­pli­ance on March 7.” A vote would come the next week, and then Bush can have his war, or, as the Times put it, “other offi­cials strongly hinted that mil­i­tary action could come imme­di­ately there­after.“
I still think I would have been right, call­ing March 1 as the start of hos­til­i­ties. I just didn’t expect the Turks to hold out like they did.