“When does AEI start trumping the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this stuff?” Schoomaker asked at the next chiefs’ meeting.

It wasn’t just most of us DFH’s who were screaming bloody murder, it was the Generals too.

Bush politicized everything and by politicized I mean he turned it into a profit center.

I wonder if Keane was working as a lobbyist for Halliburton or Blackwater. Heck, even Bush is probably in fact a lobbyist for them.

by David Howell Petraeus

Vietnam cost the military dearly. It left America’s military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged. Even worse, it devastated the armed forces, robbing them of dignity, money, and qualified people for a decade. . . . While the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership, however, the senior leaders of all the services share a similar reaction to Vietnam. There is no desire among any of them to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as: “Defeated: Inside America’s Military Machine”; “Self Destruction: the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era”; and “Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the United States Army.” The simple essence of this feeling is that, in the words of then Colonel Dave Palmer, “there must be no more Vietnams.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..55_pf.html

It’d be the only way his administration, and maybe the nation, would survive.

Nice catch.

And anyone have a link handy of that report that Petraeus wrote opposing the policy of sending additional troops into Vietnam? Something along those lines. There is one but I can’t remember the where I read originally. Going to look