[x-factor]

First, I think the author should be applauded for being so intellectually and emotionally honest with himself and his audience. Besides being an excellent piece from a practical sense, the author is so eloquent that it borders poetic in some places.

Second, please correct me if I'm wrong, guys. I'm not a trained UW guy, but I've been around a little bit and I've seen it go right and I've seen it go wrong. It seems to me (like the author implies) that so much of the craft is just basic human empathy. Its the handlers that try to "play" (bully, manipulate, trick, etc) people that fail, while the one's who treat people like people (even when things aren't going their way) have success.

Again, please educate me if I'm too far out of my expertise and talking out of my ass. I mean no disrespect to the UW profession, just trying to learn.

As for the Iraq case in particular, I'm going to stick my neck out there and disagree with TR. I don't think you could have overturned Saddam with a pure UW campaign. The RG was not the Taliban.

That said, there was definitely a happy medium to be had between a pure UW campaign and Rumsfeld's plan which was conceived as much to prove his technical/doctrinal theories as to achieve any proper war aim. For my money, the real crux of our screw up was the first month after the fall of Baghdad when we didn't quickly and smartly transition to a CA/UW campaign. As soon as the statue of Saddam fell, PSYOPS and ODAs should have been given the lead to spread out accross the country retaining/reconstituting Iraqi Army units. (I was only in elementary school, but isn't this basically what we did in Panama?)