Does Rumsfeld know what he's doing?

Not just no, HELL no.

Is that ghoul still going on TV ordering Iraqis not to burn the oil fields, or else?

 

Segroves seems to know a lot about what happens in Iraq. There's got to be a leak.

 

I think its tough to answer this without knowing where directions/decision/etc came from.

I'll grant that not being able to roll tanks through Turkey and came from 2 different directions was a very late wrench thrown in our plans.

But there's a lot of questions in my mind.

a) Who argued that we should invade anyway?
b) Why did the army planners feel that civilians would welcome us and our supply line would be secure?
c) Did we not pre-bomb for weeks like GW1 because Iraq would have destroyed oil infrastructure, or because we were truly concerned about civilian casualties?
d) What's the deal with the Kurds up north - if we fight with them, what happens when Turkish/Kurdish tensions come to fighting?

 

Four divisions strung out over 300 miles of desert with large urban centers in the rear of the van largely under the control of regular and irregular enemy forces?

The guy's a frigging genius. No one would expect that.

Edit: Oh, and your two heaviest, most advanced divisions? Sitting on their asses in barracks with all their gear floating around the Persian Gulf. Take that, Saddam!

 

Is this the famous "rolling deployment" we were hearing so much about?

 

Remember how people complained about Clinton making policy decisions by focus group? This is the first war being waged by focus group.

"Tell me, when you think of cities in Iraq, what do you think?"
"Baghdad."
"Any others?"
"Nope, not a one."
"OK then, we will march toward Baghdad."

Problem is, they should have included some Iraqis in that focus group because by almost all accounts they friggin' hate us as much as Saddam right about now.

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1085007,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2882579.stm

 

I'm sure we'll find out the answer to this question soon enough.

 

Rumsfeld knows exactly what he is doing. It is evil, but it is a complete plan and being carried out as well as can be considered.

This is inevitable when you push units to move that fast for 500 miles. There was a chance that there would be mass surrenders, and if there were this would be the best way to force lots of them before Iraq could regroup. If not, nothing lost. Heck, the Iraqis attacked the spread and disorganized line and all they did was scratch a few APCs while losing a couple hundred troops.

 

Franks, a general, wanted 500,000 troops. Rumsfeld, a pilot 45 years ago, wanted 250,000. So my question to you is: whose best hands?

 

A Public Service Announcement

If you're going to call someone a moron, you can lessen the Unintentional Comedy factor by using correct English in your insult.

 

I'm not sure it makes sense to criticize Rumsfeld unless things are going bad on the battlefield. So far, despite some reports of Iraqi resistance, it doesn't look like this is the case.

As has been stated, once the war starts you end up tossing the original gameplan out the window and reacting to what's going on.

If something's not working, you adjust.

We're only a week into this. We know it's not going to be easy. Give it time.

 

My point is we're only a few days into this. We probably have made some mistakes and we'll make some more. I'm guessing the Iraqi's have made mistakes too.

If errors are made, you adjust. If the analysts are, in fact, right, let's see how Rumsfeld adjusts.

I just think it's way too early to question Rumsfeld's competence. We won't be able to judge how he did till this thing's over.

 

It's not what's going on on the battlefield that's the problem. He made his mistake in reading the psyche of the Iraqi population and the Iraqi conscripts.

 

NPR's reporting that Rumsfeld originally only wanted 60K troops in Iraq.

 

no no no...at this point, there's a very real chance that the only way we can win this war without reinforcements* is to flatten Baghdad. As I'm reading all of the news reports and such, we don't have enough soldiers to defeat the Iraqi army without using our air superiority to demolish Baghdad, to denude it of the cover necessary for successful urban warfare defense. And you just cannot say with a straight face that we have to destroy Baghdad in order to save it.

Gringo...are you sure about that? I'd read 50,000. Maybe what I read was ground troops, and yours was total. Or I forgot.

*I read an article this morning, I think in the NYT, that the generally accepted practice for successful offensive urban warfare is to outnumber the enemy 9 to 1. I think it goes without saying that we don't have that kind of numerical superiority.