Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
I hoped that Macgregor had distanced himself from CDI. Guess not...

Sigh.

Agreed. Consider

And what of the great victories in the Persian Gulf, the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait and the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s hostile regime? Don’t those U.S. operations prove our armed forces’ historic superiority? America did quickly beat Iraq’s armed forces in 1991, and in the early phases of the 2003 invasion, but those victories were both incomplete and against forces best characterized as grossly incompetent – perhaps even the “most incompetent in the world.”1 Against the best of Saddam Hussein’s forces, the so-called Republican Guard, America’s military commanders
in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 failed to capture or destroy the Guard as the single prop to Saddam’s regime that enabled him to survive the war. In 2003, the Army’s most senior commanders again made fundamental tactical, operational and strategic errors, and in one situation virtually panicked when faced with an enemy that was virtually immobilized by its own incompetence.2
If you have to go to overstatement to make your point in a preface then your analysis is most likely bent. McGregor is great on some issues; on others he is in left field. I would put the plan to take Baghdad with 50,000 troops over the fence in leftfield.

The architects of the current war in Iraq slickly proclaim victory in sight thanks to the success of the “surge” there. Politically motivated to their very core, they studiously ignore the internal dynamics in Iraq and the region that have been inestimably more powerful in lowering the violence there. Blind as the proverbial bat, they and even opponents to the Iraq misadventure now proclaim that more of the same in Afghanistan will rescue the collapsing situation there. As Pentagon wags used to remark inside the building, “it’s data-free analysis and analysis-free decisions” that are driving U.S. policy.
That would be the proverbial pot calling the kettle out...