Lefty Loons Strike Fast

The lefty loons, aided by the news media who seems incapable of accurate reporting, are leaping all over some comments that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz made. The transcript is found here.

Wolfowitz begins these comments with this statement:

There's been a lot of talk that there was no plan. There was a plan, but as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality. Inevitably, some of our assumptions turned out to be wrong. Fortunately, many things turned out to be much better than our assumptions, in no small measure, I think, because of a brilliant military plan that achieved extraordinary surprise.

There is no humanitarian crisis. There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to -- to infrastructure; minimal war damage, lots of regime damage over decades, but minimal war damage to infrastructure except for telecommunications, which we had to target. There has been no environmental catastrophe, either from oil well fires or from dam breaks. And there has been no need for massive oil field repair.

Remember that statement as you read the rants that are being porduced by the loony left and the Democrats. Here are the three assumptions that we made that were wrong.

No Army units, at least none of any significant size, came over to our side so that we could use them as Iraqi forces with us today.
Second, the police turned out to require a massive overhaul.
Third, and worst of all, it was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting.

BTW, the assumptions were wrong about Omaha Beach on D-Day and about the Ardennes in December 1944. Incorrect assumptions are a part of tactical and strategic planning. It's the ability to adapt that determines the success or failure of the overall enterprise. The fact that certain assumptions were incorrect does not, in any way, invalidate the enterprise undertaken.

We are demonstrating our ability to adapt. In posts in this blog ( here and here for example ) and others, you read the actual reports from men and women on the ground in Iraq, and the reports of their commanders. There is absolutely no sign that we are not adapting, not succeeding. I've posted about the resistance in post-war Germany here and it looks just like what we're seeing in Iraq. Although, to quote Wolfowitz:

But even at the tactical level, I believe this will go down as the first guerrilla tactic in history in which contract killings, killings for hire, going out and soliciting young men for $500 to take a shot at an American, was the principal tactic employed.

All the Tikrit thugs have left is money. The body count is rising much faster for them than for us. They've lost, and are just playing out the hand.

-- posted by Chuck at Thursday, July 24, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main | 0 comments

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Thursday, July 24, 2003

Lefty Loons Strike Fast