Who's Blaming the Troops Here?

Yesterday, President Bush addressed the growing controversy over the missing explosives at a campaign stop and he predictably pulled out the ultimate appeal to uber-patriot morons, the claim that if you attack the administration's policies, you attack the troops themselves. And the audience, naturally, booed on cue. How dare those people say our troops screwed up! Well of course, no one is saying that the troops screwed up, we're saying that the war planners themselves screwed up, especially Rumsfeld, who refused to give the generals the troops they needed to do the job right. For crying out loud, we went into Iraq needing to conquer and occupy it indefinitely with 1/3 the number of troops that we used to liberate Kuwait in Desert Storm, when that mission didn't include any post-war occupation of a hostile country! But it seems that some of the President's defenders are in fact attacking the troops. On the Today show this morning, here's what Rudolph Giuliani had to say:

``No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough - didn't they search carefully enough?''

Or didn't they have the numbers or the orders to search and secure the munitions sites? That's what every outside military analyst says; that's what Jay Garner says; that's what Jay Bremer said; that's what the 3rd Infantry Division commander says. You gotta have some major league chutzpah to lead our young men and women into battle without a plan to keep them safe and protect them from the weapons we knew were there and then question the patriotism of anyone who points that out.

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