The real story on the site I was reading is the US Commander in Chief believed only 5,000 troops would be in Iraq by December 2006. However, as I dug through the bits and pieces of history, I could not help but notice this quote from Lt. Gen. David McKiernan’s book Cobra II:

It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense… In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides… [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.

I just heard something similar from a network operations group the other day as they chastised the engineering group for trying to issue PowerPoint slides as deliverables. Blame it on PowerPoint? In any case, the best quote from Cobra II is here:

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task – defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces – and the least amount on the most demanding – rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq. The result was a surprising contradiction. The United States did not have nearly enough troops to secure the hundreds of suspected WMD sites that had supposedly been identified in Iraq or to secure the nation’s long, porous borders. Had the Iraqis possessed WMD and terrorist groups been prevalent in Iraq as the Bush administration so loudly asserted, U.S. forces might well have failed to prevent the WMD from being spirited out of the country and falling into the hands of the dark forces the administration had declared war against.

Success was defined too narrowly by the Commander in Chief, like a half-knitted sweater ready to be unraveled. I’m reminded of the stockpiles of conventional weapons that were left unguarded in the critical early phases of the invasion. Those stockpiles that turned into IEDs….