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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (27496)	8/30/2006 6:32:59 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 541933

You still don't understand the point. Even if this war was more poorly planned than Vietnam (itself a rather unreasonably claim), that means little in the context of the claim of the worst ever military campaign / war. "Worst ever", isn't limited to American actions. Look at the Romans at Cannae or Carrhae or Teutoburg Forest or Adrianople. Look at Athens' Sicilian Expedition. Look at Napolean's Russian campaign, or the British at Isandlwana or the British in Afghanistan in 1842. Look at the Charge of the Light Brigade. Look at the British plan to defend Singapore. Look at Gallipoli or all of WWI. The whole war was a clusterf*ck on so many levels. How about Russia's execution and planning in the war against Japan, particularly the battle of Tsushima. Look at the French counter insurgency in Vietnam, particularly Dien Bien Phu and later the destruction of Groupement Mobile 100. Look at Germany's Russian campaign (strategically unwise from the start, launched late, no winter clothes, Hitler's no retreat order that allowed who army groups, with more soldiers than we have in Iraq to get surrounded, and ultimately Russian artillery falling on Berlin while Hitler commits suicide in his bunker). Is that enough? And that's not even the full list of military blunders/disasters that I know about without having to research. I'd spend all day listing them if I tried to do any research. Even if you limit it to American military disasters you have Little Big Horn, you have fighting a battle in the War of 1812 after the peace treaty was signed, you have any number of disasters and blunders in the Civil War (or even the war as a whole), you have our lack of readiness before Pearl Harbor, both at Pearl and in general. You have Task force smith in Korea, and than later our lack of readiness for Chinese intervention. You have Vietnam as a whole, you have 700 dead Americans during a training exercise to get ready for D-Day, along with quite a few other Americans killed in a friendly fire incident during another training exercise at about the same time. barnesreview.com Military blunders great and small are rampant throughout history. Mistakes and foolish decisions involving tactics, operations, planning, strategy and grand strategy are so common that even if you just deal with the famous ones you couldn't easily fit a good description of each in an entire book. I don't the claim is even convincing to a majority of even the most minimally educated "Anyone But Bush"/"No War for oil" crowd. Its less reasonable than the claim some make that Bush was behind 9/11.

To: GST who wrote (27496)	8/30/2006 7:40:12 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

I was speaking very specifically about the occupation planning. Since I am not a military historian myself, I found the take on the situation by military historians to be relevant. Apparently the lack of planning for the occupation was truly, and stunningly, incomplete and inept. I don't know what other posters may be saying, but I was impressed with how much the military did with the puny resources allotted to them (they wanted a far bigger force than they got). After reading Fiasco I think we might have been able to accomplish something in Iraq, however stupid the pretext for invasion, if the military had had the extra manpower they wanted to secure the North, and to secure Baghdad. But they didn't have those men, and we lost the window of opportunity- and it's probably hopeless to expect much now.