Quote Originally Posted by SteveMetz View Post
I don't think there are mistakes, per se, but he selects his evidence on the basis of how bad a light it casts on the administration. To give one example, he uses a few things my organization did (including some of my own) which warned of problems before the intervention and, because we are a government entity, draws the conclusion that the administration should have been aware of what it was getting into. While I'd like to believe that, I realize there was lots of other analysis which supported the administration's policy choices.

Another example is the famous Shinseki congressional testimony. Ricks, like many people, uses that to criticize the administration. As it turned out, Shinseki was right but those using this to attack the administration overlook the fact that Shinseki's number was a swag while CENTCOM and the Joint Staff had done detailed analysis that arrived at much smaller numbers. So while history has proven that Shinseki's swag was more accurate than CENTCOM and Joint Staff's analysis, the critics overlook the fact that in the context of the time, it made sense for the administration to accept the detailed force requirement analysis of CENTCOM and the Joint Staff rather than General Shinseki's swag.
To ask the simple/stupid question: what is "swag"?

Interesting. I certainly can't claim to know all that you had access to, but coming up with analyses to support the Administration's preferences is likely rarely difficult. The task of any administration should be to dig deeper than anything given to them. Hindsight is 20/20, I realize, but that is how administrations are judged. I guess I'm just pointing out the obvious.

Thanks though. Most enlightening.