This morning, Col. Jack Jacobs discussed (on a morning radio show) his thoughts on the Iraq war and (surprise!) stated he believes things will get VERY ugly in 2005. The main problem? Lack of troops. He stated the growing insurgency should have been stomped out a year ago but due to gross incompetence in the upper echelons of leadership, miscalculations have been made, often. I wrote in May about how the number of troops sent was massively short of what was needed, based on studies Rumsfeld & Co. likely read and tossed aside.

Jacobs referred to what is a main premise in these studies and that is that it’s one thing to seize a target, it’s quite another to hold it. He said it’s the holding that is the hard part, requiring the ample number of troops – which we’ve lacked in Iraq. This is Military 101 stuff. With Rumsfeld choosing to go “lean,” insurgents have been allowed to organize and grow, leading up to the day by day reports of fighting, death, etc. In effect, Rumsfeld’s amazingly wrong choice (in part due to politics, i.e. hiding from the public the true amount of soldiers needed, fooling them and therefore obtaining their approval to invade) has translated into additional dead soldiers that did not have to be.

With any other president, Rumsfeld and his crew would’ve been forced to resign (as Al Gore urged months ago), but not with this unaccountable leader. He simply operates on denial, dodging, fudge facts, ignorance, hope, bury, etc. Jacobs didn’t mention the word “draft” but he certainly hinted that it’s either that or continue to see Iraq implode in the next several months, costing us hundreds (thousands?) of more casualties.

Iraq has been a tragic failure. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter sums up how Kerry should proceed:

What John Kerry needs to do is what Bill Clinton did to George Bush the father in 1992 where the key moment was not when George Bush looked at his watch, that obviously hurt him a lot but that's the thing that everyone remembers from those debates. In my book the key moment for Clinton was when he said, 'You won't lead. I will.' At that point he kind of pushed old man Bush aside and said, 'I am the leader of the future not you.' Now the equivalent of Kerry doing that to this Bush would be to basically say, 'You failed in Iraq. You can't clean it up. You haven't caught Osama Bin Laden. I will' and make that credible.