A good Marine.:

What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. . . My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon’s military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. . . The consequence of the military’s quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort. . .

(insomnia quoting Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold of the US Marines <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1181587,00.html>)