After my read of Cobra II, it seems clear that Gordon & Trainor have done a great service to the country and more importantly, reminded the politicized senior ranks that currently hold sway within our military, that the disgrace they richly deserve is already at hand. Tommy Franks was, beyond doubt, obligated to speak truth to power, rather than to acquiese to Donald Rumsfeld's delusional and amateurish involvement in the operational planning for Iraqi Freedom. Franks knew that Zinni and Shinseki were undoubtedly correct, yet lacked the courage to risk his rank and prerequisites by forcefully disagreeing with the SecDef. Tommy Franks was in a position to know precisely the grave stategic risks that attended going to war in the Persian Gulf with a "lean" force.

The courage of junior officers in the military is easily measured by their ability to function in the face of exhaustion and horrifying physical danger. Officers failing the tests imposed by high risk training or actual combat are easily recognized and have their career paths modified accordingly.

Clearly it is much more difficult, as ambitious and physically courageous officers progress in rank, to identify and promote those who will display MORAL courage when their troops and their country are most in need. Tommy Franks is THE conspicuous failure in this regard, in his generation of soldiers. While Gordon & Trainor do not make this statement directly, the facts, apparently beyond dispute, that are systematically revealed in Cobra II establish Franks moral cowardice beyond reasonable doubt. It was his duty to recognize and confront the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was eager to set off a conflagration in the Persian Gulf while preventing the US military from using its available strength to prevail.

The only acceptable course of action for Franks was to "leave his stars on the table" and threaten resignation in the face of the wound that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rice were about to inflict on our strategic interests. He failed. Troops under his command have died pointlessly, attempting to accomplish a mission that is now doomed to fail and, by its failure, result in a shift of the global strategic balance that will threaten the security and prosperity of the United States for at least a generation.

Thus, when the time comes, will read the obituary of Tommy Franks. Hopefully, our political leadership, our military and particularly our officer corps will learn from his disgrace. Though it will be small consolation indeed for the suffering his failure has caused.

... 60 some odd years later in another languge, are just as shocking.

Someone should translate this stuff into German and write a play.

I could almost hear Hitler screeching as I read.

Sickening.

From the emphasis most authors place on Rummy going in with never-sufficiently-small-enough American force, some might conclude that Rummy's idea was to send one troop only to win the war against Iraq.

The problem with this plan is there is only one Rummy and he's just too valuable to send to Iraq to do that job -- we'll just have to be satisfied with the 140,000 we sent to do this one man's job!

I doubt the ending of this foolish madness would be any different had we christians gone in with any millions of our hordes. We would still end up like stupid fucking white men! I overheard a suit at lunch today advise another suit that Baghdad should be nuked so as to finish this mission. Comments like that make me want to sing the National Anthem in Gaelic.

There is a lot of speculation about stopping the drive towards Bagdad and mopping up what was quickly becoming the Iraqi insurgency in the South. However, I wonder what would have happened if we did.

Much of fighting a war is about momentum. What made General Grant successful when other Northern generals failed was Grant's dogged insistence of pushing ahead. After battles that would have caused the other generals to retreat, Grant pushed ahead. Stopping the advance may have singled to the insurgents that they were successful in their tactics, and caused even more insurgents to join their cause.

Still, there has to be some balance to the situation. Pushing on too fast and outrunning your ability to maintain your rear and supplies could cause your troop formation to break and give the enemy the ability to stop you and force you into retreat. This happened to the Germans in Egypt in World War II.

The big question is why we were so unprepared in the first place. It's one thing to think you could fight and win in Iraq with so few troops. It's another thing to not even have the extra troops ready for deployment. Why didn't we have another 100,000 troops sitting in Kuwait ready to be deployed in a moment's notice? When we noticed we were having supply line problems and irregular forces fighting in our rear, we could have deployed these troops and still push on ahead towards Bagdad without any worry.

We also should ask why we pushed into Bagdad so quickly when it was a natural spot to stop, rest, and secure the areas we already possessed. We could have slowly blockaded the city while negotiating with the enemy. It might have been possible to have a peaceful and orderly surrender of the government, thus preventing the lawlessness that happened when the government fell. We did this in Haiti back in the 1994 when we put Aristide back in power. We first told the Haitian government we were only there to restore order (and actually got permission to invade), then negotiated the junta's surrender after we surrounded Port-au-Prince.

In a war, you're suppose to plan for all contingencies, and it is obvious that we didn't. We never had extra troops ready for deployment. We never had a plan for governing a former totalitarian state once the government collapsed and nothing was left. We had no plans in case we weren't greeted like liberators. Our plans ended once we toppled that big statue of Saddam.

Having extra troops and contingency plans wouldn't be a problem if things went well. We could send the extra troops back home, and be grateful that everything went so smoothly. The Bush administration could have basked in the glow of victory. And, if things turned out as they did... Well, we would have been prepared for it.