Top Generals Speak on Iraq war disaster: "The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil.... Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions.... It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse.... Rumsfeld was profoundly in the dark. I think he really didn't understand what he was doing.... Nothing in Iraq was guarded except for the oil fields, which tells you why we were there.... Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years. I can't imagine when the last one was."

"We screwed up. we were intent on a quick victory with smaller forces, and we felt if we had a military victory everything else would fall in place. We would be viewed not as occupiers but as victors. We would draw down to 30,000 people within the first sixty days. All of this was sheer nonsense. They thought that once Iraq fell we'd have a similar effect throughout the Middle East and terrorism would evaporate, blah, blah, blah. All of these were terrible assumptions. A State Department study advising otherwise was sent to Rumsfeld, but he threw it in the wastebasket. He overrode the military and was just plain stubborn on numbers."

Top Generals Speak on Iraq war disaster: "The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil.... Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions.... It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse.... Rumsfeld was profoundly in the dark. I think he really didn't understand what he was doing.... Nothing in Iraq was guarded except for the oil fields, which tells you why we were there.... Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years. I can't imagine when the last one was."

"We screwed up. we were intent on a quick victory with smaller forces, and we felt if we had a military victory everything else would fall in place. We would be viewed not as occupiers but as victors. We would draw down to 30,000 people within the first sixty days. All of this was sheer nonsense. They thought that once Iraq fell we'd have a similar effect throughout the Middle East and terrorism would evaporate, blah, blah, blah. All of these were terrible assumptions. A State Department study advising otherwise was sent to Rumsfeld, but he threw it in the wastebasket. He overrode the military and was just plain stubborn on numbers."