While we’ve got the Art of War out, let’s take a look at this WaPo story:

But the initial progress has been tempered by friction between the
team of elite [US Special Forces]troops and the U.S. Army’s battalion that oversees the
region. At one point this year, the battalion’s commander,
uncomfortable with his lack of control over a team he saw as
dangerously undisciplined, sought to expel it from his turf, officers
on both sides acknowledged.

The conflict in the Anbar camp, while
extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U.S. officers say. It
highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many
regular U.S. military units on sweeping combat operations; and the more
fine-grained, patient work Special Forces teams put into building
rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people — work that
experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency.

 Special forces and regular military units: Sun Tzu recognized the need to orchestrate the two together:

That the army is certain to sustain the enemy’s attack without suffering defeat is due to operations of the extraordinary and the normal forces.

…

In battle there are only the normal and extraordinary forces, but their combinations are limitless; none can comprehend them all.

For these forces are mutually reproductive; their interaction as endless as that of interlocked rings.  Who can determine where one ends and the other begins? (5.3,11,12).

    I am sure all US military commanders would agree, and are completely familiar with these notions of careful coordination between special forces and regular military units.  So, why, after three years in the field, is this still a problem for the US in Iraq?  Why haven’t the generals figured out an effective combination of the extraordinary and the normal in Anbar province?

   This is just another example of how Rumsfeld and Bush and company never intended to reconstruct Iraq after the initial invasion; just another example of the insufficient attention to the difficult work of occupation; just another example of the delusions that preceded the attack.  They don’t have a strategy, they don’t have an effective combination of extraordinary and the normal.  All they have are empty words and threats.  Pathetic.