No. He sounds pretty good here. Many have long said we needed more troops. Obvious because of Bush's open borders Iraq policy and Rumsfeld's need to prove his small, hightech forces theory. Those failed.
As long as we have to worry about:
Colateral damage,
"public relations'',
''Political Correctness'',
what the Germans, Russians, Canadians and Kofi think,
and guys like Murtha and Kerry, the New York Times at home
we could put 10,000,000 troops in there and not achieve 'pacification'.
All that more troops with the current political / diplomatic / pseudo-religious situation there would achieve is to provide more 'targets of opportunity for the bad guys, and more resentment throughout the world, because it would indeed be seen even more as an occupation force... And would lessen the likelyhood amongst the "good Iraqis" that they would be willing to take on any responsibilities of fighting or governing for themselves.
A little less political / diplomatic restraint on the troops, and we could do the job with even fewer troops than we have now.
One, it was at least a year and over a thousand Americans were killed in post-war Germany. It was only after Truman told Adenaur to get the mess straightened up that it stopped.
Incidentally, we have been German and Japan since before 1945. Oh, we have been in Korea since 1950. That's over 50 years by my count.
We have been in Kosovo since 1991. We were only supposed to be there for a year, I thought. That's the longest year that I have ever witnessed.
We will be in East Asia for a long time to come.
Sure, we do win when we show up, but we surrender every problem that's not immediately in a crisis state in hopes of not making the problem worse. Which they invariably do. Our military strategy for defeating the Iraqi army was magnificent; it was truly a masterpiece. As far as planning for and combating the insurgency, it was a monument to our own short sightedness and stubbornness.
What we should have done is kept the Iraqi army intact, written and imposed a new constitution onto the Iraqis, and conducted a phased 'de Baathification' over the course of a few years. Instead, we pushed the Iraqis into a 'sink or swim' situation in which they're barely dog paddling. I think that we will win, and that the Iraqis will get their act together, but that we cut it much closer than we needed to. Bottom line; I don't really care for Powell, but he does have some valid points.
"No. He sounds pretty good here. Many have long said we needed more troops"
Yes, but the CYA factor here is THIS:
- Powell was promising in 2003 that we would get more international support ... it never came, we got good pledges from UK, Poland, and some other nations like Japan, but the well went dry soon and the UN was totally unhelpful.
People forget that was a part of the plan too, but it didnt happen.
"Rumsfeld's need to prove his small, hightech forces theory. Those failed. "
Wrong, The 3 week war was a stunning success and *proved* the validity of the mobility and light approach.
The only problem was that Iraq as a society also melted down, because the post-baathist society was also a post-totalitarian one. They can be very anarchic.
The post-war situation proves nothing right or wrong about how to wage hot wars, it only tells us that if you occupy a country that was once a police state, you need to recreate the police pronto.