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Rebellion in the Ranks
It was a Maalox moment for Donald Rumsfeld. At a forum held with U.S. troops in Kuwait who are headed to Iraq, the barrage of friendly fire soon scored a direct hit when a scout with the Tennessee National Guard, one Specialist Thomas Willson rose, and, his voice confident and clear but with an undertone of bafflement, asked:

"We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"...

...Neither Specialist Wilson nor any of the soldiers suing to end the "stop-loss" programs that effectively conscript them for the duration are explicitly questioning the wisdom or justice of the war – but their complaints all stem from the tactics employed by the War Party to get us into the Iraqi quagmire in the first place. Wilson's question about the lack of armor relates directly to this, because, in the rush to war, there was no time to amass the kind of equipment and personnel necessary to deal with the aftermath of our inevitable "victory."

The War Party had to get those troops in there quickly, before the rationale for war was exposed as a series of outright lies. It was only a matter of time, after all, before the "secret" of Saddam's empty arsenal got out, and UN inspectors got in. The neocons' prewar mythology – Saddam's nonexistent links to Al Qaeda, his phantom nukes, his drones that threatened to rain death down on American cities – had a short shelf life, and the idea was to sell it at any price. Their whole edifice of lies was being undermined by war critics in both parties, and most especially in the government itself. There was no time to properly armor the convoys that would take our troops into battle – only time to wish them Godspeed, and good luck....