I agree. The politicians should have been listening to the military all along. Unfortunately, that's not always the case - especially Rumsfeld.
From a 2003 New Yorker article:
"Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. “He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,” the witness said, “saying, ‘Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?’ ”
Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. “All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”
Prior to the war, Gen Franks said it would take at least 200,000 troops. After the war's start, Franks has stood by the administration in spite of the fact that Rumsfeld decided 100,000 was adequate to do the job.
General Schwarzkopf, of the first Gulf War is retired and doesn't have to support the administration anymore. His comments about Rumsfeld's response to a question posed by one of the troops about the lack of armored humvees:
“I was very, very disappointed — no, let me put it stronger — I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up,”
Schwarzkopf, who campaigned for Bush in the last two presidential elections, has criticized Rumsfeld on several occasions as arrogant and out of touch with troops on the ground.
Retired General Wesley Clark, of the Kosovo operation, still http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html . The mistake of the Bush administration, according to Clark is:
"This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck. "
So is it the parents fault for living in Fallujah and raising their kids there? Or are you saying it is their fault for not overpowering the insurgents (notwithstanding the most powerful military in the world can't)? Or is it simply that because they don't like having their country occupied by foreign armies they and their children deserve to die?
