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10/05/2004: "Anemic Troop Levels"

Via Drudge, one time Iraqi administrator Ambassador L. Paul Bremer said that (Washington Post paraphrase) "a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on." The ambassador himself said that "We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness."

More troubling to me was initial reactions to claims that troop levels were too low. From the above linked Washington Post article:

Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever." After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists.

The good news is the Ambassador emailed statement that "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq." While things may have been bad back then, and while the Bush team may have shot a couple of messengers, at least they eventually learned from their mistakes.

And even there, the messengers 'shot' by the Bush team were those that shared their criticisms in public; Ambassador shared his concerns in private and was not chastised in public.