There’s been a lot of linkage to summaries and discussions of this New Yorker article about how SecDef Rumsfeld is a stupid, petty dictator who over-ruled his top planners at every turn when they told him he needed more troops on the ground. Most discouraging feature of the article for me: frequent comparisons to Viet Nam. When I was a cog in the Military-Industrial Complex, I heard many times that we needed to stop planning to fight the last war, since the next war was invariably different. We have demonstrated yet again that even when we are fighting the last war, it’s different, and assuming it would be the same has bitten us hard on the ass:

The immediate goal, [a former intelligence official] added, was for the Army and Marine forces “to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard divisions get chewed up” by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, “The only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle—that the Republican Guards commit themselves,” and thus become vulnerable to American air strikes.

“Hope,” a retired four-star general subsequently told me, “is not a course of action.”

The article is interesting, if discouraging, reading.