President Bush's decision to approach the Iraq invasion with the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which calls for just enough troops to fail, rather than the proven Powell Doctrine, which calls for overwhelming force to win.
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This did not have to be. The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more. Totally untrue. As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for more troops, but was ignored.
Mr. Bremer confesses in his book: "Coalition forces were spread too thin on the ground. During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another." He writes that he told Condoleezza Rice in 2003, "The coalition's got about half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having this thing go south on us."
Mr. Bremer describes this in 2004: "On May 18, I gave Rice a heads-up that I intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that the coalition needed more troops. ... That afternoon I sent my message. ... I noted that the deterioration of the security situation since April had made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts with too few resources." But, Mr. Bremer writes of Mr. Rumsfeld, "I did not hear back from him."
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