Recently, there has been much discussion about the wisdom of the somewhat unconventional battle strategy of the U.S. and British forces. This hasn’t been knee-jerk liberals criticizing the administration: it’s been military experts and former generals. Though Rumsfeld denies it, we have plenty of credible reports that there have been heated arguments within the adminstration and Pentagon about Rumsfeld’s insistence on limiting the number of troops involved, invading before the forces were really ready to move, and hastening the course of everything. These same sources say that he insisted that the conflict would be over in days as the regime collapsed, despite many experts in the field telling him that hatred for Saddam wasn’t the only factor.
This isn’t a new conflict by any means: the debate over how the military should work has been going on since Rumsfeld came into power: his ideas about how the military should be organized, and how it should conduct, have been an extremely controversial issue among military tacticians: and this is only the second time that they are getting a field test.
But the response of Rumsfeld and Ari, whenever asked about the wisdom of their war plans, is simply to blame the tactics of Iraqi troops for all the failings so far.
This is an utterly ridiculous evasion. Of course Iraqi troops are responsible for what they are doing. But the responsibility of our leaders is to predict and counter-act those moves. And none of them are particularly surprising. Prior to this conflict, many people insisted that we field many more troops than we have, and move more slowly, and be very very wary of Iraqi tactics that mix guerilla strategy with regular troops (remember the big war-game fiasco?). The administration nixed these concerns, and nixed them for particular reasons that it insisted were more important. It made those claims, and they are being tested, and they have an obligation to actually respond to potential evidence that things aren’t as they assured everyone. This isn’t just a matter of disclosure: it’s a matter of demonstrating that they are actually thinking about all the different potential scenarios and how to deal with them, rather than foolishly sticking with a single expectation, never letting anything shake that worldview, and inexplicably blaming the divergences on the Iraqis (when the whole POINT was for them to predict what the Iraqis would do!)
Indeed, this seems to be a serious brain fart in a lot of people: if something goes wrong, it must be all the bad-guy’s fault, because only one person ever can be to blame for bad things that happen: no matter how predictable the bad-guys responses were, and no matter how misguided your own strategies were.
I’m not trying to say that this issue is conclusive. Rumsfeld may well turn out to be right. But if he’s right, it should be in a way that takes into account and explains all the evidence, not simply declares that contrary evidence is all the fault of the very enemy he is paid to predict an counter.