mcjoan's right…

…it's all politics of a certain kind, and not the kind we usually see played around the lefty blogosphere...

The main game here is to save the Army, and place the failure on the civilian leadership. These people are not anti-war per se, but they are anti-destroy the Army, and that is what will happen. The idea isn't just to replace Rummy, but get someone they can talk to, like Lieberman.

He may support this colonial adventure, but he's not stupid. Once Rummy is gone, the generals will tell the new SecDef the truth, and then hope to reach the President so they can get the Army out. A new Sec Def, not invested in the Iraq War as his idea, might understand when the generals tell him we've lost. Because that is what they told Jack Murtha.

I'm not sure that Holy Joe is actually their guy, but it's true that these the Generals are speaking out, in part, because Rumsfeld's hostility to infantry, in both its Army and Marine Corps guises, has deafened him to the needs and concerns of our battlefield commanders and infantry-oriented war planners. Rummy's radical 'air force and strike force' design for a 'leaner and meaner' military passed from the theoretical to the experimental phase in Iraq, and the experiment has been a resounding failure.

It quickly became evident that the contrary opinion of Air Force theorists and sundry neocons notwithstanding, when your country goes to war, especially a war which might result in an extended occupation, your military needs to be fatter and stronger (there's abundant evidence that our troops are mean enough already, thank you).

The problem is that Rumsfeld isn't just frittering away some tax dollars on a curiously named research project or pork barrel local attraction. He's getting people killed. It's a situation that has been crying out for credible whistle blowers.

Don't believe for a minute that this is easy for the Generals. While you can rise in the ranks even if you occasionally bend a rule or two to get results, there is a code among officers that transcends the rule book, and you don't rise if you break the code. These men are good soldiers and Marines who have faithfully lived by that code for decades. They're not part of any 'peace movement.' Their primary concern is the preservation of an effective military defense for the United States.

So mcjoan, again, is right when she cautions against the temptation to make the Generals heroes of the left. They're not that.

But they're heroes, just the same, some on the battlefield and all in the defense of our nation and of the health of our armed forces.