You want a fair fight? Then do it yourself!

As one Marine colonel once told me: F--k fair fights!

ìPanel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army: White House Saw Threat; Senate Cites C.I.A.ís Data That Found More Risk in Erratic Regime,î by John H. Cushman, Jr., New York Times, 11 July, p. A1.

ìBad Iraq Intelligence Cost Lives, Democrats Say,î by Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren, NYT, 11 July, p. A1.

The latest story on the ìstunningî Senate report! It seems that Saddamís army was actually getting weaker across the 1990s from all that enforced isolation and daily bombings from U.S. aircraft operating the northern and southern no-fly-zones. Imagine that? Twelve years of constant bombing actually softened them up quite a bit!

Good God! Was even the Senate that dimly aware of what was going on since the end of Desert Storm?

And yet, this judgment discredits yet another huge contention of the Bush White House regarding the Saddam takedown: his military still posed a regional security threat.

Not true! We now know.

So I guess we simply waltzed into that country and took down his military in what can only be described as a completely unfair contest.

You know, I had a Marine colonel pull me aside one day when both of us were participating in the ìbest and brightestî effort that eventually wrote the historic post-Cold War Department of Navy white paper entitled ìÖFrom the Sea.î It was during a rather heated debate about under what conditions America should be willing to go to war in the future (this was 1992), and he complained that it sometimes seemed that if some people had their way, weíd only send in the military under the most dire circumstances, meaning when the enemyís threat capacity was at its highest. ìItís almost as if they want to level the playing fieldóyou know, make it a fair fight or something. Well, let me tell you something: I say f--k fair fights! You want a fair fight? Then do it yourself!î

Of course, Saddamís military was weakened by all those years of ìkeeping him in the box.î But itís equally true that Saddam would have certainly gone back to doing more massively bad things to his own people (say, the Kurds in the north), and threatening his neighbors, and seeking WMD, and supporting transnational terrorismóif not for the U.S. military pressure constantly employed across all those years.

The fact that it took us 12 years and one war to get him to that weakened condition was why we could win the war so easily, but it also meant what weíd find there once we got in was going to end up being a whole lot worse than we imagined (remember what my civil affairs officer friends told me in NC last month).

My point is this: the Senate report is rehashing the wrong arguments and focusing on the wrong stuff. Everyone wanted Saddam gone. Rehashing the intell on our decision to go in is an exercise in pointlessness. If we had achieved the great occupation/settling down of Iraq within a year as planned, none of that decision making would be questioned now, because weíd probably still be way under 500 combat deaths and it wouldnít appear to anyone like a Vietnam redux.

What prewar intell we should be looking into is our huge misjudgments on how to organize and carry out an effective occupation/nation-building exercise. So it wasnít a fair fight in the war! It wasnít supposed to be! But we should have had a much more reasonable chance of success in the occupation than we ended up having, and intell and planning failures played THE HUGE ROLE in that strategic snafu. Thatís where Congressí investigatory focus should be.

The Senate report will go down as most Senate reports go down: as a huge exercise in navel gazing.

Focusing on the planning failure that was the occupation is what Kerry and Edwards should be harping about, not insinuating that lives were wasted in this war. We lost around 150 in the war, and none of those lives were wasted. Weíve lost more than four times that amount in this occupation (and counting) and many of those lives were wasted.

Neither Congress nor the Democrats should focus on the pre-war intell failure, but rather the pre-occupation intell failure. Give credit where credit is due: this military won a fantastic war. But also give blame where blame is due: this Pentagon planned a very poor occupation.

As for Kerry and Edwards peddling that ìthe war makes domestic terrorist attacks even more likely,î they shouldnít be. The Middle East is a hornetís nest of bad regimes, failed regimes, rigid regimes. By taking down Saddam we set some nasty stuff in motion, but that nasty stuff will be overwhelmingly over there. Yes, we will inevitably suffer another domestic terrorist strike, but it wonít be because of what we do or did over there. Itíll be because globalization is creeping into the traditional cultures of the Middle East and ìtheyî want it out and believe that attacking the U.S. is the best way to do that.

Simply put, we do absolutely nothing and weíll still raise the likelihood of a domestic terrorist attack. Globalization isnít ours to control, but to manage. It doesnít come with a ruler, but with rules.