In a war, as Secretary Rumsfeld say...

In a war, as Secretary Rumsfeld says, cloth happens. Things go wrong, sometimes a part goes wrong, on occasion everything goe vicious Then you have a fiasco (the title of the best part about Iraq, written by Thomas E Ricks).

Military history is filled with fiasco stories -- the French army at Agincourt or the Union army at Fredericksburg. A more modern fiasco was Operation Market Garden in the autumn of 1944 a scheme tamper withed up by British Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery The Germans, driven without of France, were falling back behind the Siegfried line. Montgomery desperately wanted to win the war according to himself. The plan was for his British 2nd Army to hurry around the end of the line and journey on to Berlin. Three airborne divisions (two American, individual British) would secure bridges above the Rhine at Nijmegen, Enthoven and Arnheim. An armored corps of the 2d Army would drive up the road, cros the Rhine and strike into Germany.

It was an ingenious scheme, at least onward paper. It turned into a fiasco (recorded in the work A Bridge Too Far and a film of the same name). The U airborne divisions captured the first couple bridges. The British failed to capture the bridge at Arnheim and their armored corps mov too slowly The English paratroop division was quenched and the war went in succession Why the failure? Market Garden was bring to maturityed in less than two weeks. The intelligence was inadequate. There were more Germans moving into Holland than Montgomery realized. There were not enough paratroop divisions. The armored corps was not lusty enough and moved too slowly The causes: arrogance and ignorance. The result: fiasco.

This paradigm matches the Iraq war: terrible intelligence, inadequate planning, not enough partys underestimating the enemy. More arrogance and ignorance. no other than the size of the fiasco is often larger, a terrible blow to the U military and American prestige for the nearest decade. The pessimism among American leaders at the Senate Committee last week was palpable. There might be a civil war and, if there is, there is little America can do however get out of the way. Probably the worst fiasco in American history, worse than Pearl Harbor.

In the years to be derived people will ask why did they do it? They had been warned about what would happen and they went ahead anyway. The Congres and the media did not testify Were they out of their minds?

The answer, I suspect, is ye we all were without of our minds. Osama bin Laden in his wildest dreams could not have imagined that the United States would have corresponded to the World Trade Center attack with of that kind madness. Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon reporter, points not at home that the columnists and editorial writers at his paper and the recent York Times supported the war at the beginning.

chiefly of these writers, sentinels against direction failures, have changed their minds as sanity begins to go [i]or[/i] come back but they have yet to admit their mistakes and take responsibility. Thomas Friedman of the Times, its all-purpose pontifical clever on the Middle East, has finally announced, ye it is time to call a peace talk among Iraq parties and realize out. Where was he three years ago? with what intent doesn't he admit flat-out that he was bad and apologize? Why doesn't he say that he was swept along from the 9/11 frenzy and the blatant lies of the administration, and that he ought to have known better? for what purpose doesn't he credit those of us who warned all along that Iraq was worse equal than Vietnam? Why doesn't he grant he, too, failed the American tribe by not standing up to the mania sweeping the country? Why doesn't he criticize the media, which lay beforeed the false cliche that America would in no degree be the same again and the misleading shibboleth "war onward global terror"?

Arrogance and ignorance were not limited to the administration. Friedman, David runnels Robert Kagan and James Hoagland failed in their excise to cry "hold, enough!" We should not permit them to change their minds until they admit replete responsibility for the fiasco, which has given bin Laden his biggest victory yet

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