Here's the information.
5 ex-generals show some spine, say Rumsfeld must go
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Five retired generals have broken cover and silence in recent days and called publicly for President Bush to fire his Defense Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Way past time for the officer corps to speak up, I say.

Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni was the four-star commander of U.S. Central Command just before 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has long experience in the Middle East, and President Bush used him as his negotiator in the Israel-Palestinian standoff.

Besides urging the firing of Rumsfeld, Zinni suggested that there was also something wrong with military leaders unwilling to risk their careers by speaking up against disastrous ideas that come down from their civilian bosses.

Currently serving officers have only to recall what befell the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, when he first opposed Rumsfeld's plan to cut Army strength by two more divisions, and the Army National Guard by four divisions, in August 2001, and then in February 2003 told a senator at a hearing that he thought it would require "several hundred thousand" American troops to successfully occupy and pacify Iraq.

It was the truth and it came from a standard formula that was not of Shinseki's making. But that estimate ran counter to Rumsfeld's idea, and Shinseki became an "un-person" in the Pentagon. He may have been chief of the Army, but Rumsfeld and others disparaged his estimate as wildly off the mark, and Pentagon officials leaked to the press that the vice chief would be his replacement, even though Shinseki still had 18 months on his tour as chief of staff before he would retire.

Everyone who wore stars got the message. Don't open your mouth around Rumsfeld except to say "Yes, sir!"

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, was quick to defend Rumsfeld at a Department of Defense news briefing. When a reporter asked Rumsfeld if, in a month when several generals had called for his head, he wasn't hurting the war effort by hanging onto his job, Pace responded before Rumsfeld could: "As far as Peter Pace is concerned, this country is exceptionally well served by (Rumsfeld). Nobody, Nobody works harder than he does to take care of the PFCs and lance corporals and lieutenants and captains."

One of the generals calling for Rumsfeld's departure, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who was the Joint Staff operations chief leading up to Iraq, wrote this week that Rumsfeld needed to be dismissed for his grotesque mismanagement of the Iraq war. But he had some self-criticism that surely applies to fellow generals and admirals still sitting in E-Ring offices of the Pentagon:

"I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat - al Qaida," Newbold wrote in Time Magazine.

The third to speak up was Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a recent retiree who little more than a year ago was in charge of training officers and soldiers for the Iraqi Army. Eaton suggested that President Bush accept the resignation that Rumsfeld says he has tendered before. Eaton said Rumsfeld is incompetent and chiefly responsible for the difficulties now facing the U. S. mission in Iraq.

The fourth was Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who turned down a promotion to three stars and an assignment as the second in command in Iraq last November and took retirement.

Batiste told an interviewer on CNN that he believed that the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War violated fundamental military principles including unity of command and unity of effort.

By failing to provide enough troops for the effort, Batiste said, Rumsfeld and others in the civilian chain of command had helped create the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal by placing too much responsibility on the shoulders of incompetent officers and untrained troops.

A fifth, retired Army Major Gen. John Riggs, spoke up in favor of Rumsfeld resigning on Thursday said in an interview on National Public Radio.
[my bold emphases of names]

Now, then, take the names in my bold typeface & look them up on Google.  That way you might accidentally learn something.

Strategy & tactics are not totally different things.  Tactics implement strategy.  And you don't know anything about either of them, based on the insipid, foolish question.

The grand strategy of invading Iraq was a stupid mistake, clearly identified by scores of experts months in advance of the actual implementation.  Bu$hInc presented a large group of "claims" that specific positive results would develop from the invasion.

None of them did.  It was & is a failure.  It is a thoroughly documented, asinine disaster: as in "Mission nowhere near Accomplished."  Most media now use the term "debacle" when making generalizations about the invasion of Iraq.

The failings were described in advance by well known strategic planners.  Every predicted failing occurred.  Bu$h xliii, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perls, the Kagans, etc., have all been repeatedly shown to have false, stupid, incorrect opinions about the strategy.  Their amalgamated insane decisions will be the heart & soul of military lessons about insufferable meglomania for decades.  There will be required courses at West Point & Annapolis about how to avoid the ridiculous mistakes of the war in Iraq.

No one makes anyone shop anywhere, or vacation anywhere. That people choose to do so and that you call them programmed speaks to your lack of analytical abilities.

I have no idea why you think I would want Iraqis to be like me. After all, I am only a citizen living in freedom and safety in the world's greatest country enjoying secure finances and relative luxuries of a palatial retirement compound equipped with many toys and located near friends and family.

As part of that I have the ability to be amused by the uninformed chattering of someone who calls themselves,  "Squeaky."

You're continuing inability to understand the concepts of the culture of "Jackson" merely means that you have been ill-educated. That is correctable and I advise you to do so, although I doubt you will.  

As an example of your confusion, I refer to your words re assimilation. The fault is not that of the immigrants, but of the US for letting so many in that they cannot.

And they were ordered to stand down from CentCom.

Likewise with a "war for oil." What would a real "war for oil" look like? Well, US troops would have sped to the oilfields with everything we had. Everything we had. Then, secure convoy routes would have been established to the nearest port - probably Basra - and the US Navy would essentially line the entire gulf with wall-to-wall warships in order to ensure the safe passage of US-flagged tankers into and out of the region.

There would have been no overland campaign - what for? - and no fight for Baghdad. Fallujah and Mosul and all those other trouble spots would never even see an American boot. Why? No oil there. The US Military would do what it is extraordinarily well-trained to do: take and hold a very limited area, and supply secure convoys to and from this limited area on an ongoing basis. Saddam could have stayed if he wanted: probably would have saved us a lot of trouble, and the whole thing would have become a sort of super no-fly zone over the oil fields, ports and convoy routes, and the devil take the rest of it. Sadr City IED deaths? Please. What the f**k does Sadr City have that we need?

That's what a war for oil would look like. It's entirely possible that such an operation could have been accomplished and maintained without a single American fatality.