New Army Report

I read in the paper this morning that the Army has officially released a report saying what just about everybody in America has known for years. An in-house analysis found that the Army did not plan properly or have enough troops to adequately keep the peace in Iraq after the initial invasion in 2003.

While it's good that everybody now is on the same page about the mistakes that the Army and the Bush Administration made, I'm worried that some folks, especially those important people in D.C. will come to the wrong conclusion.

With this report in hand, some advocate of regime change could argue that it is not the doctrine of preemptive war that was a failure, but rather the army's execution of that doctrine. In other words our preemptive invasion could have worked, if only we hadn't messed up on a b and c.

If we can point out exactly where we went wrong we might try to invade another country (there is this place called Iran just up the road), with a fool-proof plan to handle the aftermath of our initial shocking and awing this time.

But even if we don't make the same mistakes we made in Iraq, we will make new ones. One would hope that the disaster that has become the invasion of Iraq, would have taught us that invading another country without being provoked is always a bad idea.

Over 4000 American troops have died in Iraq. We can't let them die in vain. But we also must make sure that we learn from the mistakes that our civilian and military leaders made that caused those casualties so that other fine young Americans don't suffer the same fate.

And now here are some editorial cartoons that are completely unrelated to this post.