"So What If

President Junior doesn't know squat? It wasn't supposed to matter. Bush had 'moral clarity,' we were told, unlike certain ex-presidents whose heads were stuffed with useless information, rendering them womanish and indecisive. The purity of his motives uncluttered by geography or history and unsullied by reason, Junior was the political equivalent of a child evangelist. 'I'm not a textbook player,' Bush boasted to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. 'I'm a gut player. I rely on my instincts.'

"Even so, Bush started carrying around a book called Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime by Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins historian. Cohen protests that the media over-simplified his message. Even so, it's symbolic import was unmistakable: war is too important to be left to generals. Great wartime leaders like Lincoln, Churchill and Clemenceau overruled military men who are too risk-averse, always fighting the last war.

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the neocon hawks talked Junior into a 'faith-based' plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was going to be a cakewalk. Vice President Dick Cheney said the conflict would be over in weeks; Saddam's vaunted Republican Guard would refuse to fight.

"Richard Perle, the ubiquitous ideologue who resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board due to the appearance of war-profiteering, described Iraq as 'a house of cards' which 'will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another architect of that great game of 'Risk' to which America has committed its lives and fortunes, told the VFW that 'the Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberators.

"Barely two weeks into the war, the alibis and finger-pointing have begun..."

More at this link.

I'd say there's a bit to be said about the military having more say in matters pertaining to war.