I'll Take Incompetence for $200 Billion
Not much of a USAToday reader, but it looks like they've got some reporters who are doing more than just reporting on the Ashlee Simpson gaffe on SNL this weekend:

The moment when U.S. troops realized they had badly underestimated the resistance they would encounter from Iraqi guerrilla fighters can be pinpointed to the minute.

At precisely 9 a.m. on March 22, 2003, the third day of the war in Iraq, GIs riding armored vehicles through the southern town of Samawah waved at a group of civilians gathered near a bridge. Instead of a friendly reply, they got automatic weapons fire. The men charged the armored column in waves, attacking with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

[...]

As the insurgency has intensified, so has the scrutiny of the White House over warnings it received before the war that predicted the instability. An examination of prewar intelligence on the possibility of postwar violence and of the administration's response shows:

• Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks.

• The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.

• The insurgency began not after the end of major combat in May 2003 but at the beginning of the war, yet Pentagon officials were slow to identify the enemy and to grasp how serious a threat the guerrilla attacks posed.

[...]

U.S. planning may have underestimated how much Iraqis blamed the United States, rather than Saddam, for their prewar misery. Chief U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer's report says U.N. sanctions — maintained primarily through pressure from Washington — devastated the Iraqi middle class, a group that might have been counted on to welcome the coalition.

While Bush administration officials were predicting a warm welcome, the Iraqi dictator, Duelfer wrote, "believed that the Iraqi people would not stand to be occupied or conquered by the United States and would resist — leading to an insurgency." The resistance would arise "of its own accord," Saddam believed, according to Duelfer, who had access to Saddam and his top lieutenants.

These are some of the key points, but the article as a whole is very worthwhile. And it just continues to point out that this administration just doesn't do nuance. They can belittle it all they want, but this is not a black and white world and one needs to assess a lot of different points of view when one is sitting atop the free world. This, coupled with today's story of the hundreds of missing tons of munitions just adds further contrast to the utter incompetence of this overly zealous administration.