Thanks for this post. I heard on NPR tonight that the Army had just updated its counterinsurgency doctrine for the first time since Vietnam. Good timing, eh? I don't think I made this point very succintly in my last post, so I'll give it another try. What Wolfowitz was saying there was based on different assumption than that of Shinseki et. al. The assumption going in was that we were going to immediately put an Iraqi face on matters. But somebody (and I suspect it was Slocombe's idea, agreed to by the President, Bremer, and Chalabi) changed that plan, in part in reaction to the apparent dissolution of the Army and the perceived need to purge the Ba'athists, but the force levels were not raised in reaction. So you had a situation in which too few troops are tasked with an enormous job for which they were never intended. Now the whole "let the Iraqis to take over" was always in the cards, apparently, but it's mystifying why it didn't get underway immediately with significant resources. It doesn't seem like anybody got serious about it--Chalabi, again, was put in charge--until Petraeus was sent back.