[Zeebadee]

Quote by: Chaossaber314 Let's see, proper body armor, proper armor for humvees and tanks etc.

Evidently, not enough was available. If bush was really convinced that Iraq was a serious threat, could he afford to wait until it was?

Quote by: Chaossaber314 As far as manpower, there's been plenty of reports of generals suggesting troop numbers well above what was sent, both prior to 2003 and since.

How many should he have sent in? Would more have made any difference anyway? Wouldn't there just be more GI's to serve as targets? I suppose you are now in favor of sending more troops?

Quote by: Chaossaber314 As far as political decisions that make sense if you're thinking in the short term as politics typically (read: always) do, how about Bremer's decision to fire the police?

Since the police have been implicated in a large percentage of the "insurgent" attacks and organized executions, perhaps Bremer did the right thing. It could have been even worse.

Quote by: Chaossaber314 Point blank, the war was run by politicians and not by the military.

There are always political trade-offs when dealing with war. I'm sure that bush had to make some political concessions in order to get congressional approval to invade. Perhaps the restrictive politics originated from outside the White House.

Quote by: Chaossaber314 You shouldn't have to sit outside of a Mosque taking fire from armed guerrillas waiting to get the political go ahead to engage these targets because someone in DC is afraid of what will show up on CNN tomorrow.

I've heard this claim before, but haven't been able to verify that it has actually occurred. Have you found a reliable source for it? In any case, again, political concessions have to sometimes be made in order to secure support for the larger issue.

Quote by: Chaossaber314 Rather than guarding oil fields, maybe we should have taken a better portion of that man power and put it to defending the borders so bus loads of people couldn't be shipped in to fight, in the early days like was shown via video footage on all the mainstream stations.

This has also been open to dabate -

"I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces,'' said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Yes, there are ''many'' non-Iraqi insurgents in Iraq. But the more important question is: are most of the insurgents ''foreign terrorists'' or Iraqi nationalists?

Most experts agree the insurgency is made up of mostly Iraqi Sunni Muslims and Baath Party loyalists.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies recently estimated there are about 1,000 foreign Islamic jihadists fighting in Iraq (out of an estimated 40,000 insurgents and up to 200,000 native supporters)." Terrorists in Iraq or Nationalists?

I'm not sure that any of your suggestions would have improved the current situation. The smartest thing that bush could have done was to simply ask (and listen carefully to) Daddy why he didn't go into Iraq in the Gulf war. This war is a disaster of the first magnitude for the U.S. I just don't believe that there was a good, better, or best way to start this asinine war. The biggest mistake wasn't how we invaded, how we fought the war, or whether we should have done this or that. The biggest mistake we made was starting the war.