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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (88484)	3/31/2003 9:17:32 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

This would almost be amusing, if the subject were anything other than war. It seems such a very short time ago that so many people, from the top civilian officials at the Pentagon to posters here, were declaring that a huge invasion force wasn't necessary, and that the job could be done by a much smaller force with overwhelming air power. All kinds of blame were heaped on the senior generals - "perfumed princes" was the term in vogue" for insisting on a buildup of major forces. Rumsfeld and his allies were praised as visionaries for seeing a new generation of warfare that the stodgy old generals just couldn't grasp. Now it turns out that the generals were right all along, and that the real "perfumed princes" - the civilian chicken hawks who have never seen a battle that didn't take place off their TV screens - were barking out their backsides. We all owe a substantial debt to the generals who dug in their heels and refused to give in to plans that they knew were bad. If they had given in, we could have found ourselves in a real mess. I hope Rumsfeld has learned to stay within his area of competence. There's a real tendency afoot to ignore professional advice that doesn't fit the ideological paradigm, and it can be a very dangerous tendency indeed. We now see that a lot of the more optimistic assumptions that went along with war were wrong. I wonder what we'll see when the assumptions that were made about reconstruction have to face the test of reality.