One thing I still don’t understand about Iraq is why nobody in the Bush Administration apparently anticipated this long-running insurgency. Wasn’t it reasonably foreseeable that some of Iraq’s tens of thousands of Republican Guard troops, and hundreds of thousands of regulars, could simply hide their weapons and melt back into the population so they could live to fight another day after the US invasion? It’s not as though this scenario is unprecedented in history, or even in American history. Isn’t this the textbook solution for how to fight a more powerful invader? Let the invader come in, and then wear him down with skirmishes until he runs out of money, soldiers, and support back home. All those military experts who were trained at West Point and who were (presumably) advising Bush…did they forget about Viet Nam? Or the Soviet invasion of Afganistan? Or the American Revolution? How stupid does a person have to be to not know this?
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