■"Faulty Intelligence Misled Troops at War's Start," by Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, 20 October 2004, p. A1.
Talking to Civil Affairs officers who were over there in Iraq in the months immediately following the end of the war there, you discover how shocked they were at the level of infrastructure decay and looting. The intell community should be blamed for the first, but the blame for the looting belongs to everyone involved on our side. By choosing not to flood Iraq with peacekeepers following our Leviathan's sweep toward Baghdad, we let that inevitability unfold (hell, people loot in America with hurricanes and tornados!).
If we're not that stupid in our own country when disaster strikes, how could we have been so dumb in Iraq?
By not disaggregating the debate between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Army Chief of Staff Shinseki. The former argued for a small transformed force to win the war, while the latter argued for a large old-style force to guard the peace. That conversation was conflated into the "debate on how to conduct the war," when in reality it was a two-part debate about a two-part sequence.
