SNAFU

A little information is a dangerous thing. As such, I don't claim to have any "unique" insight into warfighting, but I've read a few books on military history, and now that I'm a little over half way into the nearly 800 page history of the Iraq War called, Cobra 2- I have to say, if we were able to "win" the war in a couple of weeks after screwing up nearly every single aspect of every single stage of the non-civil war portion of the Iraq war, I would love to see how quickly we might've won if the equipment we were using actually worked or if the people in charge knew their asses from their elbows.

The subtitle of Cobra 2 should probably be called, "Yes, I know we spend BILLIONS of dollars every year on fancy military stuff, but it's almost all total shit." The entire book is just an endless cacophony of broken everything- broken tanks, broken helicopters, broken radios, and broken plans. Nothing works properly, nothing is where it is supposed to be, and I can't tell you how many times you read the phrase "XXXX had lost control of the battle and his troops." The other most popular phrase is "XXXX couldn't get a hold of XXXX by radio or by telephone." I know war is chaotic and requires constant adaptation on the ground, but I cannot believe that it is "normal" to have so much equipment failure not caused by direct fighting.

And that is another thing. The early insurgency should've been predictable. If not before the war- certainly by the second or third day of it. Most of the battles were against Saddam's Fedayin (Too lazy to look up proper spelling) and they were wearing civilian clothes and (for the most part) driving civilian vehicles. From this account, it is clear there was never a real "war" at all. It was a counter-insurgency against an occupying army from Day 1.

The other aspect the book focuses on, planning and intelligence, also shakes out to be a comedy of errors. There's so much wrong I don't even want to get into it. Bottom line, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the war- and interested in why it went so badly. Even at the point I'm at, half way in, it is clear that Rumsfeld is a total jackass who probably deserves jail for gross incompetence, if not war crimes.

Oh yeah, and the one other thing this book makes crystal clear- they were going to find an excuse to go to war in Iraq from the first day of Bush's presidency. If it wasn't 9-11 it would've been something else. At this point, I really cannot take anyone who says otherwise seriously, too many people speak on record in this book to deny this simple, yet massively damning fact.