you can't wait until things are perfect before you act, otherwise you'll never act at all.

Agreed. Further: you should always wait until you have a chance of success. Otherwise you will never succeed.

Should we have waited 2 years before acting in Afghanistan after 9/11? No. But Afganistan has more similarities to WWII than Iraq does. It is a different case, different motives, different (and more severe) imperatives.

If you can't see the parallels between GWII and previous wars, then perhaps you should read some good military history books. I received another of your coveted awards!

We went into WWI without a single combat ready aircraft in our inventory, without enough artillery, machine guns, or ships. We went into WWII with shortages of just about everything. Even as late as D-Day* (a very carefully planned operation), there were still shortages and massive mistakes. The troops improvised. We went into Korea without enough of anything and got our butts kicked all the way down the penensula until the Inchon landings. In Vietnam, the very boots rotted off of soldiers' feet, the weapons jammed in the harsh jungle conditions, and we actually ran very low on aerial bombs at one point. I can list many other examples from later conflicts, too. Things have changed in many many ways, Larry. Current doctrine has us arming our troops with uberweapons, uberarmor, and ubertraining, so that 1 of ours equals 10 of theirs. The doctrine breaks down when we stint.

The point is that you can't always anticipate all of the possible needs or all of the possible enemy actions. The insurgents have been very innovative in adapting their tactics, especially in regard to IEDs. We're in the process of compensating. Such is the nature of war. Those who have blind faith in government's ability to plan everything seem to have a hard time coming to grips with the messy real world, especially in wartime. This is the biggest chunk of BS that is making the rounds these days. Sort of an extension of Condi's "no one could have imagined they would use planes as weapons" statement. I'd like you to point out when exactly we ran into stupid insurgents. Did the French partisans not create explosives out of anything they could scrounge up? Did the Hungarians not use overturned dinnerplates to frighten Soviet tanks from going down streets? Could we really not imagine that we might have to fight in urban areas? Give me a break. Larry, you could have planned this mess better. You should not make absurd apologies for these guys.