Full text at "Next Steps in Iraq," at TomPaine.com. Snip follows:

On the military front, there has also been progress, albeit halting progress. The challenge in Iraq has been and continues to be about turning a war-fighting force into a constabulary force: what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls shifting from the 'leviathan' mode to 'system-administrator' mode. When Rumsfeld rejected CentCom's request for more than 400,000 troops in November 2002, the Phase IV of the war was doomed. We could not do the post-conflict mission the way it should have been done.