1. Peters has been attacking the Bush administration since the early days of the Iraq conflict when the troops temporarily bogged down in a sandstorm (while inflicting heavy casualties on the charging Republican Guard). He has raised to an obsession his hatred of Rumsfeld.
2. Peters is the journalist who most hyped Abu Ghraib “torture,” thereby undermining U.S. war efforts, mostly for his own craven purposes, and subjecting American and Bush to worldwide condemnation. Peters proclaimed that these atrocities were a stain on all our soldiers past and present, that we are all responsible for the deviant conduct of a few reprobates.
3. Shinseki’s recommendation to increase our troop strength in Iraq to “several hundred thousand” was an off-the-cuff remark to Sen. Levin and never presented to the Joint Chiefs. It was interpreted by Russert as 300,000. In short, Shinseki had no plan, and he is certainly not the father of the surge, which peaked at 168,000, about the same number Rumsfeld's generals had deployed before some drawdowns began.
4. Shinseki was the general, who in the name of equality, downgraded our special operations forces. Recall the “black beret” controversy?
5. Few SecDefs have been as well prepared for their jobs as Rumsfeld, owing to his previous experience as SecDef under Ford, his navy fighter-instructor gig, his CEO stint at Searle, and his commission's study of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. in the late 1990s. The MSM, while attacking Bush as too dumb, attacked Rumsfeld for being too smart.
6. Military leaders with experience know it would be foolish to commit all reserves in one theater, especially when North Korea, Iran and China were testing U.S. resolve and capacity to respond to other crises.
7. The preferred solution to the deployment problem of long rotations were a burden on soldier families. To go to 300,000 would require a return to the draft, which only a few Democrats advocated (Rangel), primarily to increase the intensity of the antiwar resistance.
8. I do give credit to the MSM and Peters, however, for they have proved that, if one promotes a dubious set of "facts" often enough over a sufficiently long period (The Big Lie?), even well-informed FReepers will begin to doubt their own judgment.
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However, I do specifically remember this column from November of 2006 in which Peters laid out his reasons why he had soured on the military effort in Iraq:
On another note . . . Rumsfeld is one of the few people in this whole story who actually had any credibility whatsoever -- even after his departure. I've rarely (if ever) criticized him on this war even if he was ultimately responsible for its oversight. Quite simply, he was the right man for the wrong job in this case. In the early days of the Bush administration he was appointed Secretary of Defense for one specific purpose: To streamline the U.S. military both financially and operationally. He was the perfect guy for that job, mainly because of his military pedigree, his age (and accompanying lack of long-term political aspirations), and the fact that he was independently wealthy. This made him the ideal "bad guy" when it came to clashing with government and cutting off funds for useless military projects whose sole purpose was to provide financial benefits for various states, Congressional districts, etc.
The problem with the Iraq war was that this administration truly believed that it could be fought and won with this "downsized military" paradigm. And THAT was what will ultimately be remembered as the point on which the whole thing was completely botched.