Over a year ago, this post noted Hoover fellow and former U.S. Iraqi advisor Larry Diamond‘s reservations the United States’ failure to provide adequate security for the Iraqi people who are willing to risk commitment to democratic principles.
Now, Mr. Diamond has written a book on his experiences in Iraq and, according to this New York Times book review, the book harshly criticizes the Bush Administration’s adoption of the Rumsfeld Policy of attempting to reconstruct Iraq with a relatively small fighting force:

Mr. Diamond believes that one of the “most ill-fated decisions of the postwar engagement” was President Bush’s acceptance of the plan designed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld – “to go into Iraq with a relatively light force of about 150,000 coalition troops, despite the warnings of the United States Army and outside experts on post-conflict reconstruction that – whatever the needs of the war itself – securing the peace would require a force two to three times that size.” Committing more troops than the United States initially did, Mr. Diamond argues, “would have necessitated an immediate mobilization of the military reserves and National Guard (which would come later, in creeping fashion), and might have alarmed the public into questioning the costs and feasibility of the entire operation” – a development that might have slowed the gallop to war.
The lack of sufficient troops, Mr. Diamond goes on, would create a further set of problems: an inability to prevent looting and restore law and order, which would further undermine Iraqis’ trust in the United States; and inability to seal the country’s borders, which would allow foreign terrorists to enter and help foment further violence. “The first lesson,” Mr. Diamond writes, “is that we cannot get to Jefferson and Madison without going through Thomas Hobbes. You can’t build a democratic state unless you first have a state, and the essential condition for a state is that it must have an effective monopoly over the means of violence.”