The Catch-Phrase for This War

"Return on Success."

That's going to go into the history books, right up there with "Light at the End of the Tunnel."

And that's not the only similarity between Bush's Clusterfuck and Vietnam. Then, as now, a bunch of ivory-towered "thinkers" thought that they could run a war better than the military, the only difference being it was Democratic think-tankers in Vietnam and Republican think-tankers in Iraq. Then, as now, they put our armed forces into an impossible situation and the generals, instead of speaking truth to power, saluted and tried to get the job done. And in doing so, the generals sacrificed their personal honor and broke the Army as an institution.

First step towards sanity: Anyone who has ever worked at a "think tank" should be forever barred from working for the executive branch of the federal government. Any "think-tanker" who sets foot in Ft. Fumble should be shot, even if all they did was get off the Metro to go to the Pentagon City Mall.

About ten years ago, an Army officer named McMasters wrote a book called "Dereliction of Duty", about how the military leadership failed in its duty to tell the truth to the President. Anybody who doesn't think that there is no shortage of junior officers who have served in Iraq who are planning on writing a sequel to that book is fooling themselves.