Damn them.

A lot of the commentary on the report of the Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group at Ft. Leavenworth has focused on the revealation that the famous scenes of the falling statue of Saddam were a psy-ops operation ordered by a Marine Corps Colonel. Atrios offers a typical view.

Everyone knew this was a totally staged event. God I hate our media for playing along.

While there's nothing especially commendable about that particular bit of military street theater, I can't summon a lot of outrage about it, either. Psy-ops, both for enemy and domestic consumption, are part of warfare and the Colonel was just doing what we pay him for. As for the media complicity, well, they were good pictures. They were designed to be, and they were bound to be shown.

No, my outrage is mainly reserved for some of the report's details outlined in the LA Times' lede.

FT. LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — American soldiers who defeated the Iraqi regime 15 months ago received virtually none of the critical spare parts they needed to keep their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles running. They ran chronically short of food, water and ammunition. Their radios often failed them. Their medics had to forage for medical supplies, artillery gunners had to cannibalize parts from captured Iraqi guns and intelligence units provided little useful information about the enemy.

That's what they reduced our soldiers to. Short of food, water and ammunition. American medics scrounging supplies to treat American injured. Lives lost, I'm certain, because of the idealogical blindness of a President and the stubborn adherence of an incompetent Secretary of Defense to a philosophical approach to military strategy that was opposed by competent military commanders, which led to the decimation of our General officer corps until a compliant batch of toadies were assembled.

"Their medics had to forage for medical supplies..."

Damn. I'll reserve my hatred for the men that made that sentence true.

Damn them.

This administration deserves its own circle of Hell.