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?
Bush gave a speach right after we endered Bagdad and said it would take years to finish the job.
This writer is using 20-20 hindsight and making it look like total failure. Well, go back to WWII and look at the thousands of mistakes that were made in both Europe and the Pacific. Look at the tens of thousands who died in those mistakes. They are mistakes now but at the time they were what happens during war. It's not clean and it's not a video game where you know all the moves. It took us more then 5 years to give back control of Japan to Japan and 5 years for the Germans to finally accept the fact that they could vote on their own Gov't and to stop fighting the Americans!
Lets look at a few things the armchair brass all said would happen. First, they all said we would have 5000-10,000 GI's Killed - didn't happen.
Second, they all said we would get slaughtered going house to house fighting - didn't happen. Most of the deaths are from roadside bombs and accidents not fighting hand to hand.
Third, they all said support wouldn't last more then 6 months - support is still 50% two years in !
Look at Iraq in 5-6 years and it will be much better then it is today.
The bottom line is war never happens the way it does on the computer models and the human factor changes every day so hindsight is useless because the next war will be different !
What people dare not say is, (IMO) it was Powell who should be blamed for the insurgency, not Rumsfeld. It was Powell's job to get Turkey to allow us to base an attack from the north AND south. By losing Turkey in the final weeks leading up to the war by just a few votes, we allowed the Iraqi military to melt into the north as our troops rushed up from the south. Can you imagine what the war would have been like if we had two fronts closing in on Baghdad to entrap the Iraqis?
-PJ
I think the Iraq war went bad when we didn't find stockpiles of WMD. That totally defanged Bush/Rumsfeld and from then on they wanted a way out.
However, I think the impression given that Rumsfeld was a "rock star" is just remembering only the good things. Back in the Afghanistan attack, the MSM constantly brought up Vietnam, the Soviets, and "quagmire". Remember?
Iraq was a gamble and we don't yet know if it will pay off. If a strong democracy emerged, it would be revolutionary.
I'm surprised it took this long.
Rummy made mistakes, you better believe. McNamara never did anything right, that you better believe.
The author appears with a rather thin presentation, one that seems to smite Rummy more than the spineless one. Perhaps the author is another disgruntled officer that could not make it.