Frontline show on Rumsfeld

I stumbled across an old Frontline last night entitled "Rumsfeld's War" which was fascinating.

It was done in 2004 so would be interesting to see if there are updates to it, but even standing alone, it was well worth the watch.

I'm going to guess that there were critics of the show when it came out who may attacked it as one-sided, though it did grant some successes to Rumsfeld.

But what rang true was the claim that traditional Army types were pushing for higher troop stengths prior to the Iraq war but that they were overruled.

One idiot (not sure who it was) was shown testifying that he couldn't possibly imagine that it would take more troops to sustain the peace after the Iraq government was toppled than it would take to do the toppling.

What???

I'm sorry, perhaps there is a benefit to hindsight, but that just seems absurd on the face of it. Of course it takes more strength to change the direction of an entire, large, heavily populated, highly suppressed country than it does to roll over an inferior army.

It had confused me how we could have possibly underestimated the effort required in Iraq as badly as we have. It made sense that trained military men would have known this -- in other words not everyone was blind to the situation.

I also found the information on the "Powell Doctrine" that developed after the Vietnam war pretty interesting. As summarized on the program, it sounds reasonable, makes sense and lined up with the bit of reading I've done about warfare (The Art of War).

The program made a pretty compelling argument that the Powell Doctrine was or is being unmocked which just seems dangerous.

In any case, I'd suggest catching the program or watching it online. Pretty interesting stuff.