British Army Boss Of Bosses, General Sir Mike Jackson, Attacks US ...

General Sir Michael (Mike) Jackson has never been known as a man who takes any prisoners. He was until recently the numero uno - bar none - head honcho of the British Army as well as all Britain's Military Services. In other words, brass-wise, they don't come any bigger. Make no mistake, this man is heavyweight.

Here are a few other things General Jackson is and was.

General Sir Michael "Mike" Jackson, GCB, CBE, DSO, (born 21 March 1944) is a British army officer, formerly Chief of the General Staff.

He was formerly commander of KFor in Kosovo as well as UNPROFOR (see Timeline of UN peacekeeping missions) commander in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He's also the man who once (basically), told US General Wesley Clark to go f*ck himself.

Check out General Jackson for yourself, at this link.

Anyways - to get back on tack, and down to the business of the day.

Gen Sir Mike Jackson attacks US over Iraq

By Con Coughlin and Neil Tweedie
Daily Telegraph - 11:56am BST - 01/09/2007

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army during the invasion of Iraq, has launched a scathing attack on the United States for the way it handled the post-war administration of the country.

The former chief of the general staff said the approach taken by Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, was "intellectually bankrupt", describing his claim that US forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical".

Sir Mike's comments - made in his forthcoming autobiography Soldier, serialised exclusively in The Daily Telegraph - represent the most outspoken criticism of American military policy in Iraq to come from a senior British officer.

His attack - the first time he has revealed the depth of his anger towards the US administration - highlights the deep-seated tension between the British command and the Pentagon during the build-up to and the aftermath of the Iraq campaign in 2003.

Sir Mike, who took command of the British Army one month before US-led forces invaded Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld was "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq".

Ouch! Eh?

Read on.

Sir Mike says the failure of the US-led coalition to suppress the Iraqi insurgency four years after Saddam's overthrow was down to the Pentagon's refusal to deploy enough troops. A combined force of 400,000 would be needed to control a country the size of Iraq, but even with the extra troops recently deployed for the US military's "surge" the coalition has struggled to reach half that figure.

Sir Mike is particularly critical of President Bush's decision to hand control of the post-invasion running of Iraq to the Pentagon, when all the post-war planning had been done by the State Department.



"All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste," he writes. For Mr Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative supporters "it was an ideological article of faith that the coalition forces would be accepted as a liberating army.

And there's much more where that came from.

Read the rest of today's Telegraph's report.