Frankly, I have to agree with a bunch of folks on here. He could have been giving this little anti-pep talk at the next Republican Convention and I'd still think he was playing dog in the manger.

1) He's a day late and a dollar short. COIN strategy appears to be working. Listening to his diatribe was like having someone shout "who farted" right in the middle of an EF Hutton commercial. (Pardon my crudeness)

2) Just by his words, I think the assumption that he would have instigated a counter-insurgency plan if not for the fear of being fired or from taking too much direction from Rumsfield, et al is bogus. It seems clear he is a "Powell Doctrine" kind of guy and really didn't want to be doing COIN or nation building. In fact, that he would have been the person in charge of giving information to Rumsfeld, et al on the war and a major source of input on the "how to" fight in that combat theater including numbers and strategy.

In short, he's a conventional warfare guy who got stuck with an insurgency and now wants everyone to believe, in the middle of a successful counterinsurgency, that we should back out and focus on conventional warfare planning for some other threat.

I am constantly amazed that we refuse to plan for and execute both.