Some of the interviews were pretty revealing, I thought.
We apparently didn't even imagine that there could be an insurgency in Iraq. The best case scenario seems to have been the ONLY scenario we ever imagined or thought worth planning for. How any serious student of war can think like that is a mystery.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ews/keane.html
Here is a quote from Gen. keane:
Q:To whose feet do you lay this strategy? How did we get to the short-war strategy? Is that White House-driven? Is that Rumsfeld-driven? Is that [CENTCOM Commander, 2003-2007, Gen. John] Abizaid-driven?
A:I think it's complex. It's a shared responsibility, let me say up front, between the national civilian leaders and senior military leaders. I think it's driven in part by my own failures when I was there as a senior military leader contributing to [CENTCOM Commander, 2000-2003] Gen. [Tommy] Franks' plan that we never even considered an insurgency as a reasonable option. We took down the regime and thought all we had to do then was occupy the country, stabilize it, and in a matter of a few months we could reduce the force, and then in a matter of a few years we should be able to be out of there.
Well, obviously that was wrong to begin with. And once members of the regime decided not to surrender and the insurgency began to grow, the strategy that evolved in '04 was a considerably more thoughtful strategy than the one we had in '03. It was a shared strategy among the generals who were participating -- Gen. Casey and Gen. Abizaid -- and obviously Secretary Rumsfeld.
Now, it's operating within an ideology ... that you use the minimal amount of force because you do not want the host nation to be overly dependent on you. ... They looked at Bosnia and Kosovo and rejected those models, because we had a very large footprint there, and we created, in their minds, an artificial dependency from the host country on us to establish a rule of law, to get basic government services going, and we were doing too much. As a result of that, you protract your stay. ... So the strategy develops out of that basic, I believe, administrative ideology in how you apply force and how you stabilize the country with the minimum amount of force. And it's out of that that the military leaders are also designing a military strategy to help stabilize Iraq, get it to be secure, and also have a representative democracy that's not a threat to its neighbors. ...
So the administration, I think, had a role to play here with influencing the military leaders in terms of their ideology. But military leaders bear responsibility here as well in crafting a military strategy that turns out not to have worked.
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