I remembered a terrific article by Victor Davis Hanson. It doesn't deal directly with conspiracy theories, but it makes incisive observations:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTg3MmQ4MjE1NjQyMGM5OTZlMzYzZGM3NTMxZWMzYjg=
VDH is a shill.
History's Verdict
The summers of 1944 and 2004.
By Victor Davis Hanson
About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success—and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences—resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.
In an Army of over 12 million. No body armor. Far poorer combat medical capability.
Does he have a point? Not really, he is comparing elephants to iguanas.
Incisive? Not hardly.
His line on Sherman tanks needs an answer.
The Sherman tank's dimensions, by design, were constrained by width due to having to be shipped overseas efficiently to fight a war. They didn't use the CHristie suspension that the T-34, Russian, used, partly for that reason. Logistics influenced the final size and shape of Shermans as much as any combat capability. Yes, quantity has a quality of its own.
A free people and its amazing citizen army liberated France and went on in less than a year to destroy veteran Nazi forces in the West, and to occupy Germany to end the war. Good historians, then, keep such larger issues in mind, even as they second-guess and quibble with the tactical and strategic pulse of the battlefield.
While the Red Army fought the bulk of the Wehrmacht. (Yes, the Red Army used a lot of American built trucks for logistic support.)
There is more, but his article is rather pointless, in focussing on "military blunders."
In professionalism, equipment and training advantage, the US Army does not resemble its 1944 predecessor. The core error in Iraq is, and has always been, at the political strategic level, where policy is formed and then tasked to the armed force to carry out. The policy end chose to assume away reality as a method, political reality, even in the face of competent Army advice on the Phase IV stage: Shinseki was fired, not heeded, even after the US Army built a considerable library of Lesson's Learned on nation building in Bosnia.
Blaming the Army for creating the immense mismatch between means, ends, and the political/military interface is intellecually dishonest, for all that the Army, given the play book by the suits, made a number of tactially questionable decisions on the ground. These were exacerbated by the failure, in the 12 year planning phase running up to the war, to grow even a modest Arabic language facility within the force. The doctrine was to rely on allies, local, to supply interpreters (at one point) which, when push came to shove, all failed to materialize.
If you can't talk to people, your CI effort is gonna suck. Hell, the Brits could talk to the Irish, and look at how damned hard Northern Ireland is and was!
Hansen misses the point, completely, and he should know better, as a military historian.
DR