My buddy at the Pentagon forwarded me yesterday’s NYT op-ed from Thomas Friedman. (Note: neo-cons may now disregard the rest of this blog because we know Friedman to be a bed-wetting liberal al-Qaida-loving traitor to democracy, and hell, for that matter I must be, too.) Friedman’s assessment: we’re in trouble in Iraq. Well, yeah. But it’s a really detailed look at how we got into this mess. For instance:

If only the Bush team had spoken to Iraqis and Arabs with as clear a message as it did to the Republican base. No, alas, while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: “Just enough troops to lose.” Donald Rumsfeld tried to prove that a small, mobile army was all that was needed to topple Saddam, without realizing that such a limited force could never stabilize Iraq. He never thought it would have to. He thought his Iraqi pals would do it. He was wrong.

Right. All of which reminds of what I wrote way back in April of 2003, in a blog titled “How Many US Soldiers Has Rumsfeld Killed?” (Go here, then scroll down the page a ways.)

So I read this stuff this morning, and then think how many references I have seen since the war started to how thinly stretched our troops are, to insufficient supply lines, and so forth. To units having to advance through areas that we have not been able to adequately secure because we lack the necessary footprint on the ground. And I start wondering how many of the dead and wounded and captured and missing might not be dead and wounded and captured and missing if our damned SecDef were willing to listen to the experts who work for him. I’m always a big fan of innovation, of new ideas, and am not impressed by “this is how we’ve always done it before,” so I am not conferring any sort of ex cathedra status on the “tip-fiddle” (which is explained in the New Yorker article). But I am saying that in this case, Rummy’s attitude-to-substance (A:S) ratio is tipped in the wrong direction, with A > S. (This is one of my little laws for succeeding in the world – attitude is fine, but your level of attitude should never exceed your level of knowledge and substance, so A should always be S, decisions are being made not by intelligence, but by ego, which leads us frequently to D – disaster.)

Bush likes excusing himself with the suggestion that he was acting on the best intel available and that others drew the same conclusions based on the same info (in the case of the Iraq WMD question). Across the board, he wants you to believe that if he failed somewhere (not that he’d use the word “failed”) that it wasn’t his fault. Yeah, we’re having a tougher time than we might have expected in Iraq, but we’re to believe there was no way to know. That, of course, is crap – he didn’t know because his mind was made up and he rejected out of hand any and all input that didn’t mesh with his preconceived notions.

At the time what was coming in Iraq seemed very obvious to me, and it seemed that way to a few others, as well. I didn’t think it made me a genius, because the conclusions ought to have been evident to most anybody who’d spend a few moments thinking about it. But it was’t nearly obvious enough for the president, who had a mission and who was not going to be deterred by the wisdom of folks who actually knew something about the topic.

There are honest mistakes in the world, and sometimes we do screw up for reasons that aren’t our fault. But you can’t play that card when you disregarded the advice of the best experts in the world before you made your decision.