I have no respect for the second guesser.
Nor the LA Times, a worthless left wing rag.
But isn't Max Boot essentially agreeing with you?
Selective memories of World War II, which record only inspiring deeds and block out all waste and folly, create an impossible standard of perfection against which to judge contemporary conflicts....
In modern parlance, you might say that Iwo Jima was a battle of choice waged on the basis of faulty intelligence and inadequate plans. If Ted Kennedy had been in the Senate in 1945 (hard to believe, but he wasn't), he would have been hollering about the incompetence of the Roosevelt administration, which produced many times more casualties in five weeks than U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq in the last two years.
No such criticism was heard at the time, in part because of the rah-rah tone of World War II press coverage but also because Americans back then had a greater appreciation for the ugly, unpredictable nature of combat. They even coined a word for it: snafu (in polite language: "situation normal, all fouled up").