7 retired generals call the invasion of Iraq a bloody waste

It's getting shrill in here.

Some excerpts...

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94:

The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.

Adm. Stansfield Turner, NATO Allied commander for Southern Europe, 1975-77; CIA director, 1977-81:

All in all, Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions.

Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88:

The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, Commander in chief of the United States Central Command, 1997-2000:

Did we have to do this? I saw the intelligence right up to the day of the war, and I did not see any imminent threat there. If anything, Saddam was coming apart. The sanctions were working. The containment was working. He had a hollow military, as we saw. If he had weapons of mass destruction, it was leftover stuff -- artillery shells and rocket rounds. He didn't have the delivery systems. We controlled the skies and seaports. We bombed him at will. All of this happened under U.N. authority. I mean, we had him by the throat. But the president was being convinced by the neocons that down the road we would regret not taking him out.

Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000:

Now here's another thing that Rumsfeld did. As he was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know. But here's the impact: Recently, at an event, a mother told me how her son had been recruited and trained as a cook. Three weeks before he deployed to Iraq, he was told he was now a gunner. And they gave him training for three weeks, and then off he went.

Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO supreme Allied commander for Europe, 1997-2000:

Troop strength was not the only problem. We got into this mess because the Bush administration decided what they really wanted to do was to invade Iraq, and then the only question was, for what reason? They developed two or three different reasons. It wasn't until the last minute that they came up and said, "Hey, by the way, we are going to create a wave of democracy across the Middle East."

Adm. William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89:

We screwed up.

Read the whole thing.

Crowe comes to the conclusion that we should pull out. Now. That it isn't worth the price we're paying and will continue to pay. He reminds us that we thought the world would end when we pulled out Korea. It didn't. He reminds us that we thought pulling out of Vietnam would be a major loss in the Cold War and a loss of face with our allies. In fact, our embroilment in Vietnam probably extended the Cold War and our allies couldn't believe we'd gotten ourselves stuck in Vietnam in the first place.

I'm not so sure I agree with that assessment when it comes to Iraq, though. It's conventional wisdom that our pull out of Somalia was seen as a humiliation by Islamists, who felt emboldened by it. The same would be true if we abruptly pulled up stakes in Iraq.

On the other hand, the Iraqi invasion was a distraction from the fight against Islamists and now it is a recruiting tool for them. So, stay or go, it probably doesn't matter in the end. They'll just adjust their recruiting brochures and press releases accordingly.

With that in mind, then, and with this site making the losses so vividly interactive, I guess I go with Crowe's recommendation after all.