Iraq I: Insurgents? What Insurgents?

Of all the many policy mistakes and tactical errors that the architects of the war in Iraq have made, the greatest may have been to ignore and then "misunderestimate" the threat posed by the insurgents despite ample warning that they would be a force to be reckoned with during the post-invasion occupation.

Saddam Hussein, however, had seen the handwritting on the wall.

In the run-up to the invasion, the former dictator believed that the greater danger to his rule came not from the U.S. but from the very insurgents that have bedeviled and slaughtered U.S. troops for the last three years and have played an integral role in bringing Iraq to the brink of civil war. This according to a New York Times story based on a forthcoming book by the Times' Michael R. Gordon and retired Marine Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, a military analyst.

As he has done in so many other instances when realities on the ground in Iraq threatened to intrude, Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld, the imperious defense secretary, ignored or rejected the advice of his own battlefield commanders when it came to the insurgent threat, according to a second Times story based on the book, "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," which will be released tomorrow.

Money quote:

A United States Marines intelligence officer warned after the bloody battle at Nasiriya, the first major fight of the war, that the [paramilitary] Fedayeen would continue to mount attacks after the fall of Baghdad since many of the enemy fighters were being bypassed in the race to the capital.

Instead of sending additional troops to impose order after the fall of Baghdad, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks canceled the deployment of the First Cavalry Division.

There is a special place reserved in Hell for Rumsfeld, whom as the growing historic record (and not the hysterics of the liberal press) reveals, went into the war with a fixed idea of how it would be fought and how many troops could be spared without infringing on his pet project to make the 21st century American military leaner, if not necessarily meaner.

As the record also shows, President Bush has been only marginally engaged, while the shameless Rumsfeld, hands bloodied but head unbowed, has never wavered from his course. He has much to answer for.

IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

Like Rumsfeld, radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moktada Sadr is a lying thug, but he's a lying thug with a sense of irony. Says Sadr of Rumsfeld in a Turkish Weekly interview:

May God damn you. You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won't interfere.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish.)