What I don't think was feasible in post-invasion Iraq was to even locate Saddam's army. It is now well known that there were orders already in place for all of the forces to simply melt back into their neighborhoods, and to re-emerge as an "insurgency," which is what happened, so I'm not getting the method by which we could have kept them on, retrained them and then had them fighting with us - drop leaflets?
Char :)
" It is now well known that there were orders already in place for all of the forces to simply melt back into their neighborhoods, and to re-emerge as an "insurgency," which is what happened,"
And the evidence of this is, what?
Bump - 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 82nd Airborne Division from July 74 - Jan 77. Red Devils All The Way!
The one officer named as criticizing Rumsfeld, Shinseki, was a disaster. We are well rid of him.
The primary reason that so many Saddamite troops were able to melt back into the landscape was the betrayal by our ally Turkey, which no one could reasonably have expected. As a result, there was no northern front, and those are the troops who later turned up in the Sunni Triangle.
The writer also offers no alternatives to the way the war was fought. I just don't find this credible.
Leaving the Iraqi old guard in charge and having Saddam still out there would have been an even bigger disaster. I don't buy the thinking that you go to war with a country and than turn it over to the previous military within months.
Stop wasting our time.
Simply false - Shock & Awe tied up whole Iraqi divisions while our lead units positioned themselves strategically all across Iraq -
This whole article is BS - The fact is with Rumsfeld plan was an enormous success (The fact is Tommy Franks was 100% in support of this plan and has said so numerous times EVEN since he left the active military).
Iraq's main military folded in less than 3 weeks (while many of these current day critics were saying back then would take months to achieve victory and a min of 5,000 US KIA)
The other factor that is completely ignored here is that Iraq is part of the greater WOT - It is not separate from the war in Afghanistan or the WOT around the globe - It is part of it!!
And we are winning this war in amazing fashion. All of the Rumsfeld critics would have told you to pound sand if you would have told them in 2001 we would have won a war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan and a war to remove Saddam from power in Iraq with less than 2000 American KIA.
They all would have laughed and said you were crazy - Yet, now they are complaining we "didn't win good enough".
With this in mind, any other comparison is irrelevant.
Also could be known as Eric "Black Beret" Shinseki, creator of the Army of Self-esteem.
Anyone who made the upper ranks of the military during the Clinton administration is suspect.
Just because this guy disagrees with Donald Rumsfeld doesn't mean Donald Rumsfeld is wrong.
This Author is a real peice of work.
Who The F*** makes war plans for the ARMY - Rummy? Folks like this Turd who fail to realize Rummy does not micromanage, but will ultimately get blame or kudos whatever happens. This dirtbag is a real armchair general with mastery of the obvious. Where was he in '99 or '01? In Eucom or Centcom OPLANS perhaps? If anyone deserves blame its the ARMY war planners, not the Theater CINC or Rummy. Screw the Army, the Marines are doing most of the work in Iraq.
Sure, the army needs 400 Divisions to pacify Iraq and I shure as heck would not want to be on the ground during any "shock & aWE" campaign.
The Army always bitches because it can't always have things it's way.
Thanks for the trip down "People Magazine" memory lane, but does it have any relevance whatsoever to a discussion of military strategy?
What do you think of his cologne?
The only mistake that Rummy has made is not shooting MSM.
It would all be over.
I wonder if it ever crossed the author’s mind that Rummy was aware of this.
I doubt they would have every been weeded out. What we did was much more ambitious.
I agree, and have stated several times that the SECDEF is a re-run of Robert Strange McNamara.
Both men sought to make war a business enterprise and it will never be so.
My take is that the Generals weren't given full control as they were under the first President Bush.
When you fire people for making errors, everyone in the team stops taking risks. If they’re not making errors, they’re not performing to their full potential. It’s only when they m make the same error twice that they should be fired..
One thing this article has right is that McNamara was a piece of crap for a Sec. of Defense.
The current plan of keeping a lid on the 3 different cultures of Iraq appears to come more from Bush than Rumsfeld. Bush wanted to bring democracy to the region. I think H*** will freeze over before our version of that happens.
If Bush had made the decision to split Iraq into 3 pieces, we'd already been out of there, or at least would be over most of the continuing terrorist work in the Sunni triangle. A faster strategy would have been to pick a new Western-leaning dictator. This has always worked in the past, giving us a 15 year breathing room before a guy like Sadaam outgrew his leash.
If we'd partitioned we'd been able to play one off against the other more easily, yet still keep them separated.
The problem with Bush's Tito option of keeping it all together like the mish-mash of old Yugoslavia is that there has to be a strong dictator or a strong will to fight the terrorists. Right now both do not exist. But if we stay the course, and spend $$$, I imagine a government will kick start. It's just a matter of time and money. The partition approach avoids those problems with the loss of a central control of their biggest resource: oil. It appears that a central control of oil is now producing less than before the war.
Rumsfeld did and is now doing a great job, given the constraints placed upon him politically.
Bush's desire to bring democracy to the region unfortunately outruns the 2 year election cycle that it has to fit in. The Republicans will pay at the ballot box for this delay.
Hoppy
Cheney/Rumsfeld '08