General Incompetence
Noted in my RSS feeds:
In this photograph provided by 'Meet the Press,' Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace appears during the taping of 'Meet the Press'' Sunday, March 5, 2006, at the NBC studios in Washington. (AP Photo/Meet The Press, Alex Wong)AP - The Pentagon's top general acknowledged Sunday that "anything can happen" in Iraq, but he said things aren't as bad as some say. "I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they're going very, very well from everything you look at."
General's Assessment of Iraq Questioned (AP). Saying the war is going well is a statement which already oversteps the available facts, and the slow but accumulating weight of public perception
Majority in U.S. Fear Iraq Civil War. It diverges from the opinions of other virtuous embassies
BBC NEWS | Americas | US envoy warns of Iraq civil war . It trips across the theory of insurgencies for which the militaries own doctrine says that insurgencies require a multi-year wars of attrition to grind down. During that process the campaign will be in the balance, What analysis that exists shows asymmetrical wars can be lost as well as won. There is no measure at midpoint that reliably predicts the outcome. If the Army were able to state that every particular bombing or assassination campaign has ended with the absolute destruction of the cell or group that ran it and after only a few weeks of activity, that might show something, but I have not heard that. When the General desires to state that things are going "well", I will grant him that. I believe the officer corps ought to hold an optimistic outlook. When he feels it necessary to say "very well" That is his mark. A verbal campaign ribbon that shows General Pace, to the world, to be the genuine brown-noser that he is. When it comes upon him to say "Very Very well" - that just makes him look like a fucking idiot. If he really believes what he said, I regard that as a priori evidence of the need for him to be relieved of his command. If the Army is full of officers like him it should be seen as a widespread contagion of incompetence, of dereliction of duty. A cancer that will leave the US military helpless before competence and cunning, with only a thin technical capability, a veneer, against disaster. If the US Military ever has to fight an enemy with even a fraction of the resources it itself holds. It will need to forge a new relationship to the task before it and the politics behind it
Nieman Watchdog > Commentary > Iraq through the prism of Vietnam than it has now, or it will be decimated, and lose its wars.
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