William Langewieshe in Vanity Fair

People who criticize Rumsfeld for having miscalculated the numbers have got it wrong. On the one hand, we had more than enough troops to defeat Saddam's army. On the other hand, it's inconceivable that we could have ever had enough troops, at any troop level, to deal with the wakelessness problem in Iraq. You can double, you can triple the number of troops. If you permanently stationed soldiers on every street corner, I suppose that would probably have an effect, but it's inconceivable that we could do this. We saw the same problem in Vietnam. We kept increasing the troop levels, thinking that this would do the trick. The high troop levels probably did slow the defeat that occurred, but it did not affect the ultimate outcome of the war. This is an aspect of fighting guerrilla wars that many Americans seem not to understand. And they need to understand it. There will be times when we will need to intervene in guerrilla wars around the world for our own national interest, but we need to be very aware of the tools we have to work with. There is no point in bringing the wrong tool to a problem. You bring some other tools.