Reality Acknowledged

The US Army's not-yet-official history of the Second Gulf War will apparently show that the US Army lost combat momentum in Iraq after June 2003.

A report by the U.S. Army official historian said the military was hampered by the failure to occupy and stabilize Iraq in 2003. As a result, the military lost its dominance by July 2003 and has yet to regain that position.

"In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative gained over an off-balanced enemy," the report said. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."

Also, this gem:

"U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly," the report said. "This overly simplistic conception of the war led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies and too little allotted time to achieve success."

Well, it's nice to know that the US Army's official history of the war will totally vindicate John Kerry's 2004 Presidential Campaign. Someone, get me a time machine!

Brad Delong, who I purloined this link from, is optimistic:

"The U.S. Army knows that it has failed, and doesn't like to fail in the same way twice."

True enough, but it wasn't, strictly speaking, a military failure in this case. It was a failure of the civilian leadership. So long as the civilian leaders stay in place (at least 2008, now) the near-suicidal policies are likely to stay.