Quotes from John A. Nagl

Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations.

first, that in a counterinsurgency campaign, the top priority is not to kill the enemy but to protect the population from enemy intimidation. This was a dramatic change from U.S. policy

The other pillar was more original. It centered on the need to build adaptive learning organizations to succeed in counterinsurgency campaigns, which the manual described as competitions in learning.

Bush's decision to overrule Cheney and fire Rumsfeld in many ways marked the end of the six-year foreign policy string of errors that Tom Ricks correctly described as a Fiasco.