What is your baseline of comparison? Which war has been more successful than the two under Rumsfeld's tenure?
What is your baseline of comparison? Which war has been more successful than the two under Rumsfeld's tenure?
EXACTLY! Let's take WWII, as it is generally considered a successful war. There were huge blunders throughout that war. Take the Mediterranean campaign alone. There we really DID go in "without a plan". Oh, Churchill thought maybe, after clearing out Africa, the allied forces might invade the Balkans (wouldn't that have been fun). The Americans didn't like that idea, but thought there might be other possibilities. So basically the allies said, "O.K., so let's clear out North Africa and then decide where to go from there".
And there were possibilities, but those where screwed up to. It depends on how you look at it, but arguably once the German forces were isolated to Tunisia they could have been left to wither on the vine. Instead a great deal of time and effort was expended in reducing them. And then a sensible strategy would have been to use control of the Mediterranean to stage raids into southern Europe. This could have been done with relatively small forces, and would have tied down much larger numbers of Axis forces since it could not be predicted where the raids might occur.
INSTEAD we got sucked into Sicily, and then Italy, which had the exact opposite effect: Tying down large numbers of allied forces with small numbers of German forces. And the consequences of that, the forces, and especially the landing craft, devoted to the Mediterranean and Italian campaigns, delayed the invasion of France by at least a year. Consider, in turn, the consequences of THAT: The Soviet control of Eastern Europe for the next half century of the Cold War!
What, wrt to Iraq, comes even close to that? (Or several other major WWII blunders.)