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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: TimF who wrote (159499)3/23/2005 2:04:46 PM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
tf, have you seen any post-mortem of the invasion from a qualified person discussing whether the insurgency could have been prevented, esp. by any means we were willing to use (eg we were not willing to carpet bomb rebel towns)?

A lot of the talk about numbers has just been silly, along the lines of 'Shinseki wanted 400,000 so that must have been the magic number that would have prevented the insurgency'. The tendency to elevate any critic into genius level, whether the criticism is relevant or not, makes rational discussion impossible. In fact, anybody who said, 'whoa we need about 50,000 more military police, but we don't have them' was closer to the mark. The only one I heard saying that was Tom Barnett. Shinseki was talking about infantry, which might not have been helpful at all.

It is possible that the insurgency was simply not preventable, even if it had been better forseen. As the Marines like to say "the enemy gets a vote".
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