There are about as many retired generals as there are "#3 men" in al Qaeda. Somehow, we just keep finding more of both.

I have a good friend who's a retired major general of the Army Rangers, did service in wars back to the Spanish-American War, I think, and he not only thinks Rumsfeld is a complete idiot, he's irritated with his colleagues who are just now realizing it. He also votes usually for the democrats, occassionally for the greens. He's also quite elderly, as you may have guessed by my mention of the wars he served in (I was exaggerating slightly - he's in his mid-80s) and has health problems, but the feds keep cutting his health care benefits. He lives on a small ranch and is very worried that he may have to sell off the land to pay for his own care, and not leave anything to his grandchild whom he dotes on. He did, by the way, serve in the Vietnam war, but he would've much preferred not to, even at the time when he was asked to.

Plenty of General's objected to the plan prior to the invasion - many of them were harassed and sidelined like Shinseki. Military officials are trained to voice their objections and opinions in planning and operations to their immediate superiors - but they are also trained to follow the plan of their superiors once that plan is put into action. That is the military command structure - singular command authority. It was Gen. Franks job to fight for the military personnel with the civilian brass - apparently he did not believe that it was a fight that was worth winning with his superior, Donald Rumsfield. He cut and ran as soon as he could and is responsible for not standing up and protecting Americans that are now lying in graves.

All these "retired" generals are three years late and a few billion dollars short.

You forget one of the general's calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, namely General Wesley Clark.

According to Prof. Bacevich it is the Generals who try to find somebody to blame for a war gone badly. Well sir, the generals did their job with whatever means they had available. The means obviously were established outside of their authority. The planning of a war is ordinarily the job of the General Staff, in other words the Pentagon. The final approval of the militaries plans rests with the politians, Rumsfeld first and his boss finally. So , lets put the blame where it belongs: The lousy politicos for giving faulty advice to tyhe president and even faultier orders based on this advice. Rumbo had no field experience but an overinflated ego. A Navy wrestling champion, not a field commander. His bosses? One a draft evader, the other and AWOL artist, by grace of Daddy in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The Generals , however, had one final choice when their advice was ignored: Resignation. It has been done before. But better yet, let Dumsfeld resign, If GWB will not accept it, it would prove that his decision was lousy, everybody knows that by now, his right wing neocons being the 37% exception. If the Generals wanted 500 000 troops on the ground,they knew why. And maybe the troops would have really been greeted with flowers instead of roadside bombs and bullets. And maybe 2000 would still be alive and thousands more would have all their limbs. Thank Bush and Co.

Retired Maj. Gen. John Riggs (interview on NPR) and Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr.(article in NYTimes), both of whom served in Iraq. Riggs was forced into early retirement for asking for more troops.

None if you have a president who is sane.

"But Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich suggests that the retired generals are now simply looking for someone to blame for a war gone badly."

This is bullcrap. The military has been saying that Rumsfeld is incompetent from the very beginning of this fiasco. Rumsfeld's handling of the war and the deployment of personnel and his treatment of the military in general has been terrible all around. If anything the military is making it public at this point because they see that nothing is changing. They've been waiting for Bush/Cheney to dump Rumsfeld, but now that they see it isn't happening and we are in deep in Iraq they are making public waves to get Rumsfeld out.