Too few troops?(Geopolitics: Diplomacy is the police in grand costume--Napoleon)

When Saddam's statue fell in April 2003, 70 percent of the American people, along with both Houses of Congress that authorized the war, were quite happy with President Bush's decision to depose the Baathist regime. Three years and a messy reconstruction later, less than half the public says it was a wise idea.

Democratic senators and Beltway pundits scrambled to square their initial support with later about-faces. The easiest tactic: "The Administration sent too few troops, and so botched the victory that I foresaw and endorsed."

Recent statements by General Zinni (The Battle for Peace) and Michael Wood and General Bernard Trainor (Cobra II) offer the most comprehensive critique. They damn Donald Rumsfeld for shortchanging the armed forces, since he supposedly wanted to save money while transforming the military into a lighter, more technologically reliant, "less is more" force. As we saw in Afghanistan, in lieu of manpower, fewer soldiers would rely on sophisticated computer-guided munitions and indigenous forces--without a heavy footprint or burdensome logistics.

But thinking that Panama, the Balkans, or Afghanistan was the new blanket model, the critique continues, was foolish. Generals like Richard Myers and Tommy Franks ostensibly caved in to their civilian superiors' armchair strategizing. Seasoned field commanders in Iraq were left with a conventional force barely sufficient to win the war--and insufficient to secure the peace. Now, principled men like Zinni and Trainor are stepping forward in best-selling books and op-eds to disclose the "real" story of how their unsung brothers in the military were left vulnerable by ideologically-driven bureaucrats and compliant, opportunistic top brass.

There are several surprising things about this criticism--besides the premature disclosure in the New York Times by Wood and Trainor of a classified post-bellum study, enlistment of journalists to co-write their best-selling books, appearances on the talk shows to hype our supposedly fatal miscalculations in the midst of a war, and the favorable portrayal of officers and civil servants who chose to talk to the authors (with less favorable treatment of those who refused).

First, the claim that we've deployed too ...