All Walking Wounded, Fall Out and Draw Rifles!

Go about 4:20 into this clip. (The movie is Battleground, one of the best war movies ever made.)



43,000 soldiers who were medically unfit for duty have been deployed to Iraq. That is roughly two large divisions' worth of troops.

Think about that for a minute or five. We are sending people into combat who, in earlier wars, would have been deemed to have been too old. We are sending augmentation forces from the Navy and the Air Force to do Army jobs in Iraq. We are sending in the walking wounded.

In any rational environment, doing one of those things is a sign of trouble. Doing all of those shows that we are critically short of manpower for this war. Steps like that are not "building on success" (or whatever clever turn of phrase the Bush Administration cares to proffer). Throughout history, steps like that are a sign that an army is on the edge of defeat and is just hanging on by its fingernails.

Pretending otherwise is no more than buying into propaganda and lies.

(H/T to Alternate Brain)