‘There is no longer anyway to tap dance around the responsibility of the administration for what more and more looks like a monumental bog up,’ Thomas Houlahan, told UPI. Houlahan is the Washington-based director of a military assessment program for James Madison University at Harrisburg, Va. He is also a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division and staff officer with the 18th Airborne Corps.

The planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Houlahan says, ‘was very slipshod and not up to the standards of the U.S. Army.’

Timothy Carney, a former U.S. ambassador who has just returned from two months in Iraq, has said much the same thing.

Carney, with long experience in post-conflict zones, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the White House failed to think through post-war plans and that there was a lack of resources and of priority for reconstruction efforts. UPI

These analyses, however, miss the boat because they accept the fundamental premise of US adventurism. We didn’t just miscalculate the extent of Baathist resistance or the costs of civil reconstruction or policing efforts. We are facing not isolated sniping from foreign elements or scattered residual Baathists but a broadbased spontaneous resistance against an imperious occupying force.