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

To: thames_sider who wrote (27505)	8/30/2006 7:02:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541958

A lack of readiness before Pearl Harbour does not make a moronic war, nor a weak plan of attack. The initial issue raised was worst planned war. We were totally unprepared for WWII, our military was small and completely unready. The planning was much worse than it was in Iraq. Even post Pearl Harbor, a lot of our early operational planning and execution was rather poor, sometimes even abysmal. If you look for worst planning, worst execution, worst results, worst decision, etc. you get a different list, but WWII alone has items on each list that are worse than the American involvement in Iraq. Most obviously worse results, and not just on the losing sides. there aren't many wars which were entered into as obviously, voluntarily and with as little need or urgency as Iraq. There have been many throughout history. I even named one or two. For example Crassius's campaign against the Parthians, undertaken so that he could win military honor, which result in Crassius and his son's death and the utter destruction of his army by a force he outnumbered. More generally, you might argue that Napoleon's or Hitler's invasions of Russia were failures - but they were campaigns within wars, not entire wars. And both of those also nearly worked. Whether they nearly worked is debatable. They where campaigns within a larger war, but they involved more people than we have fighting this current war (esp. the Russian invasion). They were both major extensions of the war, esp. Hitler's invasion which started a war with Russia who had not previously been an enemy. The fact that Germany was also fighting other countries at the same time, only makes the blunder more foolish and significant not less. The negative results of both, both in the strategic consequences and in the number of casualties sustained dwarfed the American involvement in Iraq. None of these are the case for Iraq; IMO, you miss the point. A bad war is a war that never needed to be fought at all. This really does make US vs Iraq one of the worst. Even if you isolate that as you won overriding criteria, there are quite a few wars with even less justification, and the consequences of some of those wars where much worse. And I really don't think its reasonable to put that one criteria so far above all others, if your looking at military blunders and mistakes.

To: thames_sider who wrote (27505)	8/30/2006 7:51:11 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 541958

Just so you know, there's a straw horse wandering around in here. The military historians that Fiasco quoted which started this whole discussion said that the occupation phase was the most poorly planned "war" plan- it wasn't actually a plan, apparently. This task force apparently came up with a few power point slides and called it a "plan". It was a joke. No one paid attention because it was worthless. Right before the war the job was yanked away from the original task force, which did the crummy job, and given to someone else- who also failed to produce a plan. The argument here, of course, veered wildly off track, mostly because very few people here have read Fiasco- and so there's a lot of imagining and guesswork going on. But as for me, I am amazed the first part of the war went as well as it did, considering how badly the administration treated the military. There were dramatic cuts in manpower against the wishes of the military and they succeeded anyway. But without a plan for the occupation, and without the troops they knew they needed, there was no way the occupation could go well.