First: too few troops. Top Pentagon officials rebuked U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told Congress it would take at least 200,000 troops to keep the peace in Iraq.

Instead, the Pentagon planned for only 110,000 forces for the post-war occupation — not enough to prevent widespread looting or an insurgency.

Fine. Maybe more troops would have prevented some looting. Certainly they would help close off the flow of killers currently coming in from Syria and Iran, although the latter country pushed most of its people in disguised as pilgrims, which are bad form to shoot. I would dearly love to hear how even 500,000 troops go about preventing an insurgency. What is the actual procedure involved? Shoot potential insurgents? Imprison them? Just wondering.

According to former Secretary of the Army Thomas White, “A great deal of the problems we have today were caused by not being in overwhelming strength at the time we took over the country. We were not able to secure critical infrastructure that was subsequently looted power stations, hospitals, government buildings and the like.”

Most of this infrastructure was a pile of crap when we moved in. Talk to some of the outfits that had to rebuild it. All the hospitals are open now. Power is back on. Does anyone notice?

Second: the decision to disband the Iraqi army. A year ago Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, let Iraqi soldiers go home with their weapons instead of using them to create a security force.

We didn't disband them as such. They evaporated on their own. We marched into the cities, and there was "nobody here except us civilians."

Would also dearly love to see what procedure you or anyone else would have for checking out an entire army for Baathist sympathizers instantly and putting them on the front lines while we are just finishing major combat operations. These people are slowly and carefully being brought back into the system, which was the only practical way to do it. Even so, the Iraqi forces probably contain a considerable number of "sleepers."

There were plans for the invasion. There were plans to prevent the dams from being destroyed, to secure potential WMD locations, to prevent the Kuwait-like destruction of the oil wells. Plans to occupy the nation with minimal damage and minimal death. They worked. Does anyone care? There were also plans for combat to go on a lot longer than it did. It didn't. Should there have been a plan for Iraq to fold up like a house of cards?

Who the hell successfully plans a war? Have you ever seen a war that was "planned" ahead of time that worked out that way? All things considered, our military has adapted quite well. You don't hear about that, do you?

Take a look at this. How much of this do you see in the papers? On the news? Did 60 Minutes do a special on the transfer of power today to the Iraq Foreign Ministry? Did you even know about it?

It is getting extremely difficult to watch all this and still come to the conclusion that these people want us to win. I hope the obsessive hatred of Bush is worth it.