Surprise is one of the most important assets in a successful military operation. One of the reasons that the Normandy invasion was successful was that the Germans didn’t believe that the Allies would invade at that point–it was too well defended and too difficult. Almost up to the last minute, they assumed that the attack would come further to the east.

For months, those speculating on the beginning of the war’s renewal have assumed that it would occur during a new moon. Implicit in the logic of this was that it would occur in the dark of night. It was becoming clear in the past few days that the lunar phase was no longer relevant to the timing of operations, but it occurred to very few that light conditions themselves were irrelevant. This morning’s attack (Baghdad time), which occurred just before sunrise, showed that this was in fact the case, and probably surprised the targets considerably.

We’ll see the degree to which this changes the course of the war shortly, I suspect.