Sanchez condemns "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan."

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded ground troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, has written a new book "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" in which he talks of the Bush administration's "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan."

He also talks of the neo-con mindset which led to the catastrophe that is the Iraq war.

In 2006, I was forced to retire by civilian leaders in the executive branch of the U.S. government. I was not ready to leave the soldiers I loved. The Army was my life. Service to my nation was my calling. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I watched helplessly as the Bush administration led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions. It became painfully obvious that the executive branch of our government did not trust its military. It relied instead on a neoconservative ideology developed by men and women with little, if any, military experience. Some senior military leaders did not challenge civilian decision makers at the appropriate times, and the courageous few who did take a stand were subsequently forced out of the service.

Are the Bush administration going to accuse Sanchez of hating the troops?

And, despite Bush always claiming that the generals make the decisions - (step forward Petraeus) - Sanchez gives a very different reading of what's actually taking place on the ground.

During that first year of our nation's occupation of Iraq, I observed intrusive civilian command of the military, rather than the civilian control embodied in the Constitution. I saw the cynical use of war for political gains by elected officials and acquiescent military leaders. I learned how the pressure of a round-­the-­clock news cycle could drive crucial decisions. I witnessed those resulting political decisions override military requirements and judgments and, in turn, create conditions that caused unnecessary harm to our soldiers on the ground.

Sanchez is actually saying that political interference in military decisions harmed soldiers on the ground. That's an awful long way from the picture that Bush has been painting of a Commander in Chief being guided by military generals on the ground.

We've always known that this was a perfidious lie, but now, finally with this book, Sanchez confirms it.

And no sentence in his book deserves to undercut the myth of the Republicans love of the armed forces more than this one:

Over the fourteen months of my command in Iraq, I witnessed a blatant disregard for the lives of our young soldiers in uniform.

Sanchez should know. He was there. And that is what he witnessed. "A blatant disregard for the lives of our young soldiers in uniform."

This book deserves to have the same amount of attention that McClellan's is having, for what it says is just as important and undercuts all of the lies that Bush has been trading on since the invasion.

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Tags: Sanchez, Iraq war, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld