Angry American,Conventional wisdom has me arneeigg with you; but in light of the fact that President Bush has been listening to his generals to a fault, perhaps that is the problem? I don't know for sure, but this Rich Lowry article offers food for thought:By Rich LowryTuesday, December 26, 2006 President Bush is finally getting over his version of the Vietnam syndrome."If you're 60 years old, you tend to be a product of the Vietnam era," Bush told me and other journalists in the Oval Office a few months ago when asked if we needed more troops in Iraq. "I remember the tactical decisions being made out of the White House during that period of time. I thought it was a mistake then, and I think it's a mistake now." Bush will eat these words if he orders the troop "surge" into Baghdad that is considered skeptically by some of his top generals. He thought he was avoiding a mistake of the Vietnam War by deferring to his generals on troop levels, but he has only internalized an erroneous conservative belief about that conflict. Conservatives falsely think that it was the civilian leadership that lost the Vietnam War by restraining the military.The true lesson of Vietnam is that the civilian leadership should exercise close supervision of the military and ensure that, when fighting an insurgency, it acts in ways that don't come naturally to a U.S. Army that is most comfortable when smashing a conventional enemy.As Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. recounts in his classic book on the military's failures in the war, "The Army and Vietnam," it was a civilian, President John F. Kennedy, who was prescient about the coming era of guerrilla warfare. He pushed the Army to learn counterinsurgency warfare, but it ignored him.The civilian who bears the brunt of conservatives' ire is President Lyndon B. Johnson. He once bragged that "they can't bomb an outhouse without my approval" and imposed political constraints on the use of force. But in a limited war, such constraints are inevitable. The question is w