Quote Originally Posted by jlechelt View Post
Interesting point. Examples? Even with a few mistakes or biases, it seems he pretty much nails a lot of the problems that have been evident over there. No?
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.