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I very much liked your comments, and especially your devastating description of the fool in the corner of the room at the party. And I quite agree with the thrust of your remarks.

However, it seems to me that there is something very much wrong with our position today in Iraq which should be fixed but cannot be fixed so long as we dismiss all criticisms out of hand. I am not suggesting you do that, quite the contrary, your point is well taken. My concern arises out of criticisms which come from a more respectable source, Pulitzer prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks in his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

By all accounts this reporter who spent four tours in Iraq, and did not isolate himself in the Green zone, has made a well-documented and devastating criticism of the conduct of the war, all toward reinforcing this point: Bush's decision to invade Iraq "may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy." Yet he is quick to add this point, in an explicit warning directly aimed at Democrats which I just heard him make on C-SPAN to the effect that we cannot withdraw and we must not lose. In the event of an American bug out he sees a disaster in the making in the region with Saudi oil and its money going to Al Qaeda as that regime inevitably falls, and with Pakistani nukes going to Al Qaeda as that regime inevitably falls as the consequences of an American bug out.

Although I have not read the book, I did read a transcript of his interview with Amazon and watched carefully his interview on C-SPAN and I read all the online reviews available. Ricks does not leave his criticism with Bush and Cheney but includes Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. He cites massive intelligence mistakes. He faults the media, especially Judith Miller of the New York Times. And he blames Congress for failing to conduct oversight. Finally, he blames the military itself for forgetting all the lessons it had learned about counterinsurgency and reverting to self-defeating and counterproductive big army tactics. His criticisms in this regard seem to be in keeping with the insights which appear in the book Imperial Grunts.

He offers concrete ideas which he says the military will never accept: He advocates that top brass be required to stay in Iraq until the war is won while being granted extensive and frequent leave out of the country. He wants to see more officers of the caliber that teach in the war College to be posted to Iraq to operate his advisers. He wants our troops withdrawn leaving a very large cadre of advisers to train up the Iraqi forces while lowering our own profile which only feeds the insurgency. He wants the money currently being wasted on amenities for our troops to be diverted to equipment for the Iraqi forces, presumably because our troops for longer be there.

He sees a 5% chance of success if we continue on our present course. As I noted above, he is very pessimistic about the disaster which will befall us if we fail.

I intend to read this book just as soon as I can get it over here in Germany. I do not believe this author can be dismissed as easily as we can dismiss Baer. It is my hope that people like you on these threads will undertake a serious response to a serious analysis. Otherwise, these threads are doomed to degenerate into one long screed against liberals and forfeit their role as the most important web site on the Internet.

criticisms which come from a more respectable source, Pulitzer prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks in his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

Sources, know-it-alls and experts are everywhere; and they all have meditated on their navels long enough to produce yet another vain slab of expert advice, criticism, armchair quarterbacking, and 20/20 hindsightsmanship.

Our brave, finest-in-the-world military and our constantly besieged leaders are wrestling 24 hours a day with the most rapidly changing, multi-faceted war calculations and strategies ever faced by any President and Commander in Chief and his team in the last 100 years for the most insidious and despicable enemy we've known... NOW. We're in the battle for our lives.

The intangibles .. will to fight, morale, esprit de corps, confidence in support back home...they're all fragile but vitally essential elements to the success of the military machine.

These folks .. comprised of honorable inviduals who volunteer to kill, destroy, suffer, sweat, witness unspeakable atrocities, bleed, get injured and die to defend their country and us .. they and their state of mind must be considered and protected.

We're so grateful for them, we love and honor their precious service to us. How can they not hear the constant drone of doubt .. how can it not penetrate their spirits and be deflating and demoralizing? They have to be primed, psyched and confident for battle every minute of every day.

It's enough already. Save the autopsies for later. In the midst of this huge and desperately important undertaking, and in this age of instant communication and internet access, all the pundits, opinion pieces, biased media jabs, political adversaries, books, lectures, ads, etc. dissecting, criticizing the past and the present have gone beyond the pale.

Anymore, consider the source. Politics is playing a huge role in most of it ... and the Pulitizer Prize has been cheapened immeasurably. If Dana Priest can get one for publishing classified information that's compromised our country's security, it obviously doesn't mean much anymore .. because politics is there now, too, just as it lurks in everything today it seems.

It's probably true: if today's media and immediate access to everyone's latest burp occurred in WWII, we'd probably be speaking German.

God bless and protect our courageous President and incredible Armed Forces.

We have made a number of mistakes in the way in which we fought the war in Iraq. We did not use overwhelming force and, after Saddam's regime fell; we did not have sufficient forces available to secure the borders with Syria, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia, which is not very passable, but still should have been covered with some forces; we did not have sufficient forces available to secure the arms dumps Saddam had scattered throughout the country, thus permitting the insurgents to arm themselves and especially with explosives which they secured by using artillery shells; and we did not have an immediate plan ready to go to train a new Iraqi military, which should have been a necessity given that we fired everyone in the old Iraqi army. These mistakes all come down to one larger problem, we did not commit enough resources to do the job right.

We also have been too easy on Syria, who we all know has been training and supplying logistical support to the insurgents, and that is a diplomatic failure. And then there is the missed chance to fight an aggressive propaganda war we could have inititated by putting Saddam on trial ourselves, rather than following this lame line that "we will let the Iraqi people try Saddam and deal with him on their terms." It's three years since the invasion and over a year and a half since his capture and what do we have? One trial completed except for its verdict and a second just beginning. We could have brought scores of the lesser culprits up to work our way up to Saddam and earned a lot of points with the Iraqi people, even with Sunnis who knew the nature of Saddam's regime deep down, even though they supported the social context of his national rule.

But for all these failures, we haven't ruined the job as completely as some people seem to suggest. We can point to individual months in the Vietnam War when we lost more soldiers killed than we have in any single year of the Iraq War. We can also point to the fact that there is an Iraqi political process underway, it's very fragmented and chaotic, but that is something I think we all can expect. It's government is recognized in the Arab world. This is war, and it's not supposed to look pretty. We are getting about what we should have expected from the beginning. There is only one test we face that will determine whether or not we win this fight; will we maintain our commitment to see it through? If we do not cut and run, we win. It's that simple.