Interesting Tom that you have reservations (and rightly so) about how quickly they ramped up the Iraqi police and armed forces. To me that implies that the alternative to quickly putting security in the hands of the Iraqis would've been for us to field an adequate size force to completely control the country until the turnover job could be done methodically and properly.

Yet in the past, you've stringently defended Rumsfield and his generals for their decision to go small and you've disparaged the few generals that quit or were forced out that were advocating a huge invasion force. So is this a turning point? Are you now willing to brand Rumsfield an incompetent playmaker as your opponents have been contending all along? Do men like General Shinseki now seem like Oracles to you? Interesting how they were disgraced by the Bushies.

Of course my opinion is still that it wouldn't have mattered what size force we sent in. Breaking Iraq was like poking a hornet's nest with a stick. The swarm envelops you from all sides and the stinging ones look just like the ones that would prefer to be just left alone. The basic blunder was going in in the first place.

Art