I DON’T KNOW IF I’LL DO A WRAPUP of military predictions that proved wrong, as I did once the Afghan War was settling down. But if I did, I might include this piece by Jeff Taylor, which begins:

The cliché is that generals are always doomed to fight the last war. The reality on the ground in Iraq sure makes it look like the generals have been doomed by their political leadership to fight the last battle.

The ease and manner with which the Taliban were kicked out of Afghanistan seems to have given the Bush war planners a false impression of how things would unfold in Iraq. The two situations were and are radically different.

Not everything in Taylor’s piece is wrong, but the key point — that the planners were trying a repeat of Afghanistan — is about as wrong as can be. But don’t ask me, ask someone who’s actually in the military:

The stunning advance, at a cost of fewer than 10 U.S. combat deaths, would silence complaints by television generals, and even some officers in the field, that the war was being mismanaged. It would also provoke another kind of talk.

”The U.S. advance on Baghdad is something that military historians and academics will pore over in great detail for many years to come,” British Air Marshal Brian Burridge said Monday. ”They will examine the dexterity, the audacity and the sheer brilliance of how the U.S. put their plan into effect.”

Already, military analysts are comparing the advance to Gen. George S. Patton’s brilliant attack across northern France in the autumn of 1944.

Instead of getting bogged down in pitched battles for cities along the road to Baghdad, U.S. forces raced directly to their main objective, pausing to fight only when given the chance to exact a heavy toll on the Iraqis. The speed of the assault and the intensity of the accompanying air campaign gave Iraqi units little opportunity to retreat and regroup; the U.S. advance quickly gobbled up the Iraqi rear.

Compare these two articles, and you’ll see that Taylor appears to have missed out, in ways that go beyond just the aspects I’ve quoted. In a way that’s no surprise, as he was trying to offer criticism of a war plan that he didn’t know (and couldn’t) and that hadn’t unfolded. But, then again, maybe he shouldn’t have tried to do that.