Via The Green Knight:
[T]he only way that we can maintain our way of life is to have a strong defense…. And we had that before we started this little adventure here. Now we’re beginning to eat it up….The equipment and the people are getting chewed up and spat out. And that’s not the right way to defend our country…..I tell you I was in Iraq and we saw some of the peace protests that were done at that time. And I felt like people really cared about me because they were taking the time to address the issues. And get really involved and do something rather than just emit jingoistic slogans….
There seems to be no real mission right now. We keep talking about winning and fighting terrorists. But terrorism is a technique. You can’t win against terrorism. We’ve talked about turning it over to the Iraqi Army and we’ve talked about the constitutional process….But the fact is we got about 140,000 of America’s best and brightest sitting in the desert and just sort of standing in a kill zone…. So we need to tell them what the goal is, what they have to achieve….
Mr. Rumsfeld, the civilian head of the Pentagon right now, he comes from a corporate world where everything is measured. And every night our commanders in Iraq have to submit all kinds of data…. And yet there seems to be no metric that defines our success. And the only numbers we hear are changed constantly…. We have the generals saying one thing. The civilian leadership saying another. And none of it seems to make any sense.