And it takes a while, especially in a war where not many generals are being killed, to weed out the political peacetime commanders, like Clark and Zinni.

I’m not sure who, if anyone, was looking at small wars at the time. I guess we did ok in Grenada and Panama, so maybe somebody was. Where was Petraeus at this time?

Americans are better at insurgencies than the Baathists. Meaning if Americans were outnumbered up against heavy armor, Americans would do much better than Baathists would have done if they were outnumbered up against US Army armor.

There were no regular forces after Saddam implemented the insurgency plan. He put all his eggs in one basket, and eventually ended up with the spider hole.

You’re doing exactly what I complained of! Those generals may have been critical of the conduct of the war, but you and the rest of the antiwar crowd try to co-opt any criticism as “proof” that we’re doomed to defeat.

Trimegistus, I wish I were you! What an active and wholly self-contained fantasy life you must lead!

To counter your claim that “everyone” who criticized Rumsfeld was a traitor who wanted us to lose in Iraq, I provided a list of US Generals of distinguished service who were openly critical of Rumsfeld and demanded his resignation, some since 2003.

My “co-opting” of that criticism as proof we’re doomed to defeat, and why one should have anything to do with the other in the first place, is entirely in your head.

Maybe, like Lincoln, we’ll have to go through several generals before we find the right one for the present war. And it will benefit us to remember that, whoever he is, he will probably not be the right one for the next war.

We created the conditions by behavior that was almost always honorable and often much better, by consistent effectiveness in battle under difficult conditions and constraints, and by a generosity of spirit that undermined the practiced suspicion.

The enemy made the change in opinion and loyalty happen by behavior that was so bad it cannot be called unprincipled; it was and is founded on “principles” that are perverse and evil.

Like most words, “steal” means something different to Muslims than to non-Muslims. If an infidel man speaks to a Muslim woman, he has not only kidnapped her, but raped her and left her for dead. Embellishment and exaggeration is such an ingrained tradition of Islam that they simply skip over all the intermediate steps and go straight to the logical end point of the gossip, and both the woman you have spoken to and all Muslim men in the vicinity will react accordingly, often in seconds.