Tom Ricks has a good
post on H.R. McMasters, who is reviewing Middle East Strategy for Petraeus at CentCom. Ricks thinks McMasters knows his stuff and links to his recent article blasting the Iraq invasion.
McMaster demolishes the view that the U.S. military had a great plan for invading Iraq but that bad old L. Paul Bremer III and other civilians subsequently blew it. In particular, McMaster spanks former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his partner in the invasion planning, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks...
...the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other
This passage Ricks thinks is especially insightful:
Decisions against deploying coalition forces in numbers sufficient to secure populations left many commanders with no other option than to adopt a raiding approach to counterinsurgency operations -- an approach that tended to reinforce the perception of coalition forces as aggressors and conflated tactical successes with actual measures of strategic effectiveness. Inadequate troop strength and the approach it impelled created opportunities for the enemy.
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