I love Donald Rumsfeld and his no-nonsense demeanor, but the only big miscalculation that he and the president both made was their underestimation of the enemy. Not the enemy in Iraq, mind you, but the enemy within the US. We trounced the Iraqis militarily, but because of the unprecedented access to Iraq that we permitted the media to have, they were able to wage an unrelenting campaign against the war by continuing to report gloom and doom and harp about the casualties.
Once we'd made the decision to go to war, we should have banned the media from the combat zone, and continued to enforce that ban wherever our soldiers were in combat. We should also have taken much more vigorous measures against leakers and publishers of classified information here at home, rather than permit these agents provocateurs to faciliate breaches of our national security.
It's obvious that the presence of an anti-American MSM in Iraq has had a "chilling effect" on the kinds of initiatives that we could have taken against the enemy. We should also have used complete and unrelenting force (i.e., total annihilation, regardless of the potential for civilian casualties) against the Sadrists and insurgents from the very beginning in this media-free environment, instead of hoping that they would "play nice" in a democracy. No war has ever been truly won with half-measures.
We would NEVER have won WWII had the media had the kind of access that they've had in this war. Only through the malevolent eyes of the anti-American MSM could such a resounding military victory be protrayed as a "failure". We should never have trusted them, from the beginning.
Actually, I would argue that when media (e.g., embedded reporters) were there with our troops, they saw what smart, professional and hardworking folks we have fighting for our freedom.
It's when these idiot media types all sit around at Hotel Baghdad with no access to anything but the latest explosion down the street staged by terrorists for their benefit that things get bad. And if they were banned from Hotel Baghdad, they'd all be over sitting in the bar at Hotel Kuwait City, developing a gin-and-group-think fueled, shared interpretation of the war that has no bearing on reality. PJ O'Roarke has written a ton about how conventional wisdom on world conflict gets decided by a whole bunch of lemming reporters in hotel bars. It would be funnier if it weren't so dangerous.