Juan Cole on Rumsfeld's statements to the troops:
Rumsfeld's dictum that 'you go to war with the army you have' begs so many questions it would take days to list them all. But just for starters, let's point out that the officer corps wanted to send more like 300,000 troops to Iraq in March of 2003, not the 100,000 that Rumsfeld insisted on. Rumsfeld's mania for turning the entire US military into special operations forces ignores the need to keep order in the aftermath of a war. Paul Bremer admitted that 'we never had enough troops on the ground' and that the lack led to the orgy of looting, which the US was not in a position to stop and which there was not even much will to stop. The looting in turn paid for the incipient guerrilla war (and a good deal of the looting was from weapons depots like al-Qaqaa, despite the Bush administration's denials).
So Rumsfeld didn't go to war with the army he had. He went to war with a much reduced military force, to make some sort of weird point.
There's lots more, some a retread of things we've heard before, some new. What I can't get around re: "go to war with the army you have" is that it's only true when war is forced upon you. When you choose to go to war the way the Bush administration did, then you have the luxury of planning and having the best military force for the job. For these jackoffs, "plan" is a four-letter word.
Posted by Jason at December 9, 2004 09:30 AM