Gen. Swannack Sneaks Up From Behind

Don't turn your back, Rummy!


From the Washington Post:

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday.

How can we lose strategically? Hughes has got it right; as in Vietnam,
we can lose strategically when the will of the American people is broken.
This might be one thing we all can agree on, democrat, republican, liberal,
conservative, and, most importantly, terrorists, all of us know the only
possible way to make the US cut and run -- bog them down, break their spirit.

And it's not surprising that this minority of generals have axes to grind
with the Secretary of Defense. I'm sure they all have their own visions of
how the effort should be, and should have been, conducted. And with all the
differing views, the final strategy is bound to disappoint some of them.
It's how they're handling this disappointment that just amazes me. These few
generals somehow decided that the best way for them to affect the rebuilding
effort in Iraq was to throw their lots in with the anti-Iraqi-forces. These
generals, who still must know soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq, are giving
the AIF hope. They are adding their weight to the effort to snap the will of
the American people.

The photoshop of Gen. Swannack preparing to stab Rumsfeld in the back is a
little harsh. Much harsher would have been the depiction of the real victim
of these generals' irresponsible actions -- the American soldier still in
Iraq.