[Alberta's Child]

You should go back and look at the string of replies that led up to that comment. The point I was making was that Rumsfeld was right -- I was replying to someone who claimed that nobody in the Pentagon had predicted that Iraq would fall so quickly.

[Petronski]

The point I was making was that Rumsfeld was right...

My apologies. If that was your point, I completely misunderstood you.

[lepton]

You should go back and look at the string of replies that led up to that comment. The point I was making was that Rumsfeld was right -- I was replying to someone who claimed that nobody in the Pentagon had predicted that Iraq would fall so quickly.

He was responding to me. In Post 111, he argued in part: "Nothing I heard back in 2003 indicated that anyone underestimated the ability of the U.S. to topple the Hussein government in three weeks (which is a whole other issue, because it points to a clear consensus about Iraq's military ineptitude at the time)."

I responded: " Respectfully, you must not have been reading the papers, nor listening even to several of the retired Generals, nor even been aware of the plans. One of the things that was a mess early on was that NO ONE thought it would only take three weeks, and so the follow-on support wasn't prepped to begin for another six weeks after Baghdad fell."

Alberta's Child responded:Baloney. Rumsfeld himself predicted in March of 2003 that Iraq would fall in "days or weeks."

I recall that a like comment came during one of the "quagmire" stages of the war after the invasion had begun, and asked for a (pre-war) citation date.