war

IT WAS late May, in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, and I asked him whether the U.S. had a model in mind for rebuilding Iraq. “Well,” the reliably frank V Corps commander told me, “we’re making this up here as we go along.”
It stuck with me because it is increasingly clear that Washington’s postwar plans were at best ill-formed—and at worst uninformed. U.S. soldiers are trying their best. But America’s military universities don’t teach them peacekeeping or nation building. Quite the opposite: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has authorized the Oct. 1 closing of the Peacekeeping Institute at the Army W...