Once the ill-considered decision was made to go in, then it should have been a coup de main, an overwhelming strike. Not just to take out Saddam's army, that was a paper tiger, but to seal the borders, intimidate the Syrians and Iranians and flood the cities with security troops and nation building specialists. We should have had enough to not only occupy the oil fields but the pipelines and refineries as well, and every key part of the civilian administration and public utilities. This meant keeping as many of the ministries, bureaucracy, army, police and Baath party members needed to run the country, just like we kept key Nazis we needed in Germany to help run the place after we had occupied it. We know how to do this, we''ve done it before, but we chose instead to follow the advice of the opportunist Iraqi emigres who had seduced the Bush gang with the fantasies they wanted to hear so they could re-establish themselves in power under American protection. We didn't even have the capability in place to broadcast instructions to the Iraqi people when we invaded, forcing them to rely on Al-Jazeera for the news.

The military told Rumsfeld exactly what they would need to do this job right, 400,000 men. He chose not to listen to them because it would be too expensive and perhaps lead to too many casualties. Rummy went in with just enough to defeat an army and trusted to luck to have everything else fall into place. Not only did he he reject the advice of his own military and of advisers friendly to him, he marginalized all those who counseled against him, wrecking careers and dismissing his critics with that same contempt and self-righteous arrogance that has come to characterize everything about this administration and the lockstep armchair warriors that have rubber-stamped all its decisions and made excuses for its criminal negligence.

Needless to say, it didn't quite work out the way they expected, did it? It may be easy to dismiss all this as Monday morning quarterbacking, but we knew all this, or we should have. Don't we have a State Department, a CIA? It's our government's job to know this, and not to
dismiss those who do know because they insist on pointing out inconvenient truths. And when things started to go south, it was always someone else's fault, the press, the liberals, the Democrats, even bloody Europeans who were trying to tell him exactly what was going to happen. In the meantime, we spent so much effort looking for WMDs to justify our being there in the first place that not much else got done.

The Bush Leaguers failed to predict the insurgency, the foreign infiltrators, the militias, the criminals, the religious divisions, the tribal
conflicts, they went in blind. And why was there not more outcry from people like myself who originally supported the invasion? Because we were deliberately lied to in order to cover up the abysmal lack of preparation and political stupidity of this pathetic gang of blow-dried wimps we call a government. And at every point where we might have withdrawn or adjusted relatively intact, after Saddam's capture, after the elections, we did absolutely nothing, not even modified our tactics or changed our strategy.

So where are we today? The army is exhausted and demoralized, we're in debt, our allies have abandoned us, our enemies are encouraged and thriving, the puppet government we've installed insults us and until recently, everyone who had the audacity to point out the obvious was publicly denounced as a fool, or a traitor or a coward. Even now, I am told the only reason we didn't do it right from the start is because of the "professional pants wetters", presumably people like me.

Is it any wonder we're pissed off?