You can teach an old Rummy new tricks

In today's Wall St. Journal, there's a good story on how the U.S. Army is rethinking its approach to future wars. With chaos mounting in Iraq, it is plain to military planners that wars in the future will require fewer tanks and more soldiers with knowledge of the culture and language they're moving amidst, and that killing the head no longer means the body will die, which is what was expected to happen when Baghdad fell.

But early on, there's a quote from Donald "proven leader" Rumsfeld:

"We have got to focus more on the post-combat phase."

One fights the urge to be shrill, but Herr Rumsfeld, there were a great many people focusing on the post-combat stage in Iraq.

In fact, as the Journal's Greg Jaffe writes,

Before the war began, Middle East experts, along with some Army officials, warned that stabilizing and governing a fractious and ethnically divided Iraq would be much harder than toppling Saddam Hussein.

But Rummy and his brilliant sidekick, Paul Wolfowitz, either ignored or ridiculed those experts. It was Paul Wolfowitz who said before a congressional committee that he can't conceive of a situation where the forces required for the stabilization phase would be greater than the forces required for the military operation.