Here are comments by General Peter Pace today. Pace was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time of the Iraq invation.
"One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi Army would welcome liberation, that the Iraqi Army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation," Gen. Peter Pace said.
But "they disintegrated in the face of the coalition's first several weeks of combat, so they weren't here," Pace said.
Had he known that would happen, he would have recommended more troops be sent at the outset of the Iraq war, he said.
What is it I am not getting? If the Iraqi army had "stood together" then it would have made the initial invasion much more difficutlt. The only other option besides standing together and fighting the coalition invasion was disintigrating.
It sounds like Pace thought they would "stand together" and not fight us. I am completely missing his logic. The more we find out about the thinking of those in charge at the beginning of this was, the more it looks like the debacle was inevitable.
Pace still wants to blame the whole mess on one chance event:
The force was built and equipped, Pace said, but the February bombing of the Golden Mosque -- one of the holiest Shiite sites -- ignited long-simmering tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, further destabilizing the region and cutting short any plans for U.S. troop reduction.
Our plan was so tenuous that one (un?)expected bombing completly spoiled it?
The full story is on
CNN.com.