WASHINGTON - An active-duty U.S. Army officer wrote a scathing attack on U.S. generals for their role in the war in Iraq, accusing them of misleading Congress and the public about the situation there."America's general have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq," charged Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in an article published on Friday in Armed Forces Journal.

Throughout the 1990s, U.S. general failed to gauge the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces properly, Yingling said, without naming anyone specifically.

Nor did they accurately inform Congress and the public about the number of troops needed for the Iraq war, he said.

"America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq," Yingling wrote in the journal, which is published by a unit of Gannett Co. Inc. and is widely read by members of the U.S. military.

Having spent a decade "preparing to fight the wrong war," U.S. generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq, namely failing to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population, he said.

"Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq," he wrote.

Yingling charged that after going into Iraq in 2003 with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, U.S. generals did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public.

He wrote that while for more than three years U.S. generals insisted the U.S. was making progress in Iraq, for Iraqi civilians each year has been more deadly than the one before.

"For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq," Yingling wrote.
© Reuters Foundation 2007.