[island_dude]

Fint says: "Why would one even consider the "study" of a group of political operatives that was too scared to leave the green zone and have less combined military experience than Patsy. At least Coulter cites numbers and facts."

What facts is she citeing? Last I checked, she has never been near either the green zone or anyplace in the middle east. Coulter is good for entertainment. She is catering to an audience that wants to beleive that we are actually winning this war. The fact is, Rumsfeld himself has made grim assesments of the situation. He has been quick to find ways to deflect responsibility for it. There is no question that it is going badly. It doesn't matter what metric you use to measure it with. I was against this action from the begining as founded on weak assumptions. So far every reason for going into Iraq has turned into a fiction. This isn't an issue of not having the guts to handle the troop losses, its just a stupid situation. We should never have gone in, the war was executed poorly (after the intial take over), and this administration has refused to even acknowledge the reality on the ground let alone adjust tactics to do anything about it. From wah I can see, we have polititions telling the military what the reality is instead of letting them do what makes sense. I am glad that Rumsfield is out, but I doubt that there is much we can do with this situation. We replaced a nasty dictator (which we proped up to counter the Irannian threat in the past) with a quagmire. The fact that Bush isn't interested in finding a new approach isn't surprising. Its not like he has any real credentials. Maybe the problem is that he listens to idiots like Coulter.