How did Paul Wolfowitz ever manage to get a paying job? The guy’s hopeless. Phil Carter has a great takedown of Woflowitz in this column, which includes this snippet:

… Oh, Wolfie. Seriously. Can we talk?

When you say the American government was “pretty much clueless on counterinsurgency,” you really mean that you were pretty much clueless, right? Because within an hour’s drive of your office, you would have found thousands of people with actual experience in post-conflict stability operations and counterinsurgency. That group includes (but is not limited to):

- Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee it would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” to secure post-war Iraq.

- The team lead by RAND’s James Dobbins, who put together estimates of what it would take to secure Iraq based on historical analysis. Using troops-to-population ratios from previous occupations, RAND projected that it would require anywhere from 258,000 troops (the Bosnia model), to 321,000 (post-World War II Germany), to 526,000 (Kosovo) to secure the peace.

- The entire Army and Marine Corps peacekeeping and small wars community, which developed tremendous institutional knowledge about these issues in such places as Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Latin America.

- The State Department’s Future of Iraq project — for although they were not planners writing an operational plan per se, they understood something about the resources required to provide stability in post-war Iraq.

- National security experts at the Army War College, who, prior to the invasion, provided insights into the challenges of post-war security, stability and reconstruction in Iraq.

So Wolfie, it’s simply not true that the American government was “clueless” about counterinsurgency. Not true at all. Rather, officials like you chose to keep yourselves in the dark by refusing counsel from those who knew something about counterinsurgency. And you actively stifled dissenting views by criticizing officers like Shinseki as “wildly off the mark.” Clueless is not the word I would use to describe your mistakes.