MORNING WAR UPDATE….According to CNN, Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that the U.S. may have underestimated the scope of deceitful activity by Iraqis. I’m not quite sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.
Lt. Gen. William Wallace admitted today that we didn’t know ahead of time how the Iraqi paramilitary forces would fight. I wonder if that’s what Wolfowitz is talking about?
You know, this general disagreement between the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz faction and the military brass about the use of “overwhelming force” has been going on for a long time, so it’s not as if this is something that cropped up just for this war. But I sure hope Rumsfeld turns out to be right. In 1991 we had about 650,000 troops compared to 250,000 this time, and that was for an easier task ? all we had to do was kick Saddam out of Kuwait. Granted, the Iraqis are weaker now thanks to 12 years of sanctions, and our technology is a decade better, but 400,000 troops is still an awfully big difference.
I sure hope our war plans aren’t based too heavily on this idea that the Iraqi population is just going to lay down its arms and hail us as liberators. Has that ever happened before in history?
UPDATE: One thing I haven’t seen much discussion of is why Rumsfeld and Cheney are so wedded to the idea of war on the cheap. Did they really think they would have a harder time getting approval for military action if it turned out to cost $150 billion instead of $75 billion? Or are they thinking ahead to other wars? Or were they worried about leaving a few divisions intact in case we needed them somewhere else? What’s the motivation here? Why not just let the brass send in half a million troops and get the job done?
