Damn.

It happened again.

I've been toying with this terrific post on the whole Al Qaqaa situation and how it's just another inevitable consequence of an absurd battle plan based on Rumsfeld's radical theories about military reorganization, and the experimental implementation of those theories in a real battlefield situation - a battlefield designed, I believe, in no small part to test those theories regardless of the very real cost in human life. Just as our rush to Baghdad left our flanks open and the enemy armed and in tact at our rear, we bypassed caches of offensive weapons that our troops are now being attacked with.

And Digby wrote it first.

Which wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, except that he says it so well that I'm once again reduced to a swipe...

This Al Qaqaa disaster is 100% the fault of the civilian leadership of the Bush administration. One thing that has to be remembered about these early days was the insistence that the army push through to Baghdad at record speed, stopping not even for rest or refueling. Do you remember the embeds hanging on to the back of jeeps and humvees by their fingernails, looking like hell, as they raced through the desert to get to Baghdad (and then found that Baghdad was wide open?)

These lethal explosives are missing because Rumsfeld was using Iraq as an experiment for certain aspects of his Revolution in Military Affairs wet dream. He managed an impressive dash across the desert with a relatively small force but because he was trying to prove a theory rather than deal with a very real situation on the ground, his refusal to commit enough troops to the operation as a whole meant that they could not spare the manpower or the time to secure these weapons dumps.

He has more. You should read it. He's exactly on point.

Blame Rummy. Blame Bush for hiring Rummy.

And schedule next Tuesday off to help fire them both.