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Rummy said, after the invasion, that he was expecting to be down to 30 000 by Christmas 2003.

Iraq, or the people who live there, hold most of the responsibility for it being FUBAR.

But the ignorance and incompetence of our planning is staggering, and has a lot to do with the present state of mind of our people.

Letting Sadr gain power while killing our people was also a major mistake that leads us to where we are today.

I agree, and I hate that I do.

On the ground conditions always change- and so the plans must- but the lack of understanding of who the enemy was/is is unbelievable.

re: But the ignorance and incompetence of our planning is staggering

I think a lot of that was due to the fact that we didn't understand just how backward these people are and how violently minority of them would work to prevent Iraq from entering the 20th century, or even the 19th century for that matter.

It's a fact that when you have a basic fight between good and evil it's the evil that get the early upper hand. The evil has no compunctions about doing whatever it takes to attain their goal. The good on the other hand are reluctant to do what it takes to overcome the evil so they end up going through a lot of wasted motions trying the things that would work on them but are laughable to the evil ones. Eventually, if they are to ever win, the good have to resort to the evil's tactics. But by using this approach they get the worst of both worlds. The good side loses lots of people and resources, and incurs the wrath of the rest of the world, and then have to inflict the kind of destruction they refrained from using in the first place. The lesson is that if you have to defeat an enemy it's better if you do it the quickest way possible, even if it means having to use tactics you would normally never dream of using. The difference is these tactics are the first weapons of the evil and they will use them every time they get in a fight. The good however will use them as needed and then revert to their peaceful ways until forced to use them again.

If we don't acknowledge this need to use really harsh tactics to defend our way of life we are going to lose everything, not just our good opinion of ourselves.

Like it or not, we are in a battle of good against evil, just like in the horror movies where the monster comes back to live every couple of thousand years and must be returned to hell to save the good guys.

Do I favor incinerating a billion Muslims to preserve our way of life? No I don't 'favor' it. Would I do it if it meant the difference between my grandchild living or dying? In a minute, and thank God that I had the ability to do it!