I GUESS THE ARMY NOW HATES AMERICA

According to the wingnuts, almost any criticism of America, especially the War in Iraq, means you hate America. How will they spin this report?

Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: June 29, 2008
NY Times

The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own nearly 700-page account: “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.”

In essence, the study is an attempt by the Army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts — and to itself.

...the “On Point” report carries the imprimatur of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations from active or recently retired officers.

The study’s authors were instructed not to shy away from controversy while withholding a final verdict on whether senior officials had made mistakes that decisively altered the course of the war, said Col. Timothy R. Reese, the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., who, along with Donald Wright, a civilian historian at the institute, oversaw the volume’s preparation.

“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study noted. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.”

“I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of our plan, ‘Okay, we are in Baghdad, what next?’ No real good answers came forth,” Col. Thomas G. Torrance, the commander of the Third Infantry Division’s artillery, told Army historians.