Iraq notes

Some thoughts after reading The New Yorker's KNOWING THE ENEMY on the treadmill:

• Hussein didn't believe that the U.S. would ever invade Iraq because he had build up such a huge poison pill though degraded infrastructure and massive caches of money and weapons to fuel an insurgency.
• Likewise, the U.S. military built its own type of poison pill after Vietnam. To insure that it would not get trapped in a Vietnam-style counter-insurgency again, it basically shed all its counter-insurgency capabilities.
• Neither Hussein nor U.S. military strategists anticipated the that a combination of unlikely events would invest so much power in someone as naive as George W. Bush.
• From a purely strategic standpoint, it would have made perfect sense to completely stabilize Afghanistan before moving on to Iraq. Hussein did nothing to force our hand. The reason Bush jumped the gun on Iraq was to take advantage of the domestic political momentum created by 911. He is driving stakes in the ground to force future Presidents to finish the work he started (or clean up his mess, depending on your perspective)
• Why was Rumsfeld so reluctant to provide sufficient troops or increase troop levels to the appropriate metrics? His agenda in taking the Sec Def job was RMA -- Revolution in Military Affairs -- replacing troops with smart technology. Increasing troops levels would have robbed him of money for RMA. Conversely, keeping troop levels artificially low would speed the development of RMA and force its acceptance. New military technologies and tactics are never really accepted until validated in a real battlefield.
  

David Brooks cooments: One gets the feeling from his articles that America’s enemies are playing a different game. They’re waging an open-source campaign for cultural symbols, while we’re oblivious to anything we can’t drive over or kill.