Sorry if this is a bit long.I'd pretty much given up on finding much here besides the trading of insults, but I notice that someone seemed to indicate a desire to respond in some serious manner to a recent post. So I'll give it a shot. In the spirit of a respectful exchange, and with real concern for our country and the future of our efforts in Iraq and the war on terrorism, I draw your attention to the following article, from the New York Review of Books, concerning the Schlesinger Report, concerning Abu Ghraib and systematic use of torture as policy. I also offer a quote from the article that more directly deals with our likely success in Iraq. And I would ask you to consider that clearly low ranking soldiers are being scapegoated for carrying out the directives of superior officers and policymakers in Washington.What do you think?http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17430Schlesinger report puts it bluntly, "there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations." And though they don't say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops—admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public—decided to "tough it out," at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to "liberate." All told, the reports offer a vivid and damning picture of a war that is understaffed, undersupplied, underresourced, and, above all, undermanned.In this sense Abu Ghraib is at once a microcosm of the Iraq war in all its failures and the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, warning of what is to come. In fighting a guerrilla war, the essential weapon is not tanks or helicopters but intelligence, and the single essential tool to obtain it is reliable political support among the population. In such a war, arresting and imprisoning thousands of civilians in murkily defined "cordon and capture" raids is a blatantly self-defeating tactic, and an occupying army's resort to it means not only that the occupier lacks the political support necessary to find and destroy the insurgents but that it has been forced by the insurgents to adopt tactics that will further lessen that support and create still more insurgents. It is, in short, a strategy of desperation and, in the end, a strategy of weakness.