Quote Originally Posted by pcmfr View Post
IMO, we went in way too heavy in Iraq. Had we gone in with SOF only, decimated the Iraqi Army with air power (much like in Afghanistan), and bought off the tribal leaders (as we are doing now), I'm not sure the insurgency would have picked up steam like it did.

It is because of folks like GEN Shenseki (not in spite of him) that we went in with too large of a conventional ground force for the job.
That's interesting, I've only ever seen that argument made by Air Force officers and maybe Colonel MacGregor. But wasn't Saddam's Army, Republican Guard, and Fedayeen a totally different beast than the Taliban, and, Kurdistan aside, with no credible domestic opposition? Seems to me like the truck-mounted Fedayeen, at the least, could have dodged our bombs as well as the Serbs did in Kosovo.