So Donald Rumsfeld is the latest power-mad civilian to enter the 'bureaucrat-turned-general' hall of fame after his lurch to war despite the misgiving of his own generals, has had his plans fail spectacularly at the cost of millions of dollar$ and far too much blood. The US army, at his planning, waded into a war they thought would be a 'cakewalk'. Here we are, eight days into the war, the advance on Baghdad has stalled and reinforcements being rushed out to prop up and overstretched front. Nice one, Donny. What is scary, is that the whole US plan hinged on two crucial points;

1.That the Iraqi army would capitulate.
2.That the civilian population would rise up against Saddam.

Now, if your big plan hinged on these crucial points, you make sure that you had the intelligence to back it up? Yes? Well, no. Not in Donny-land. Sample of this planning; "During our interview, [with] al-Qurairy [former brigadier-general in Iraq's intelligence service] repeatedly claimed that the CIA men who debriefed him in Ankara appeared uninterested in much of what he had to say." The anti-war movement had pointed all this out; we'd said it's not going to be that easy. We'd said that the people blame the US for their misery as much as Saddam. Did they listen to these or any other of the hundreds of points made about this idiotic adventure? No. Why not? Oil-on-the-brain, I guess.

And as if that wasn't enough, we also find that the US army plans have also encountered problems, because according to Lt-General William Wallace; "The enemy we're fighting against is a bit different from the one we wargamed against." Doh!? Did the US planners really expect that Saddam would roll out his tanks into the desert to be picked off like space-invaders? Seriously, what did they think he'd do? Evey armchair general when assessing what to do against a military force so overwhelming mush have looked at campaigns where they lost (Mogadishu and Vietnam etc.) and thought; Guerrilla War. I mean they even had an exercise in Summer 2002 that pointed out the flaw in their plan when the general assigned to play Saddam, won. He later told the Guardian; "when the real fighting starts, American troops will be sent into battle with a set of half-baked tactics that have not been put to the test." Except this time the blood is all real. I can already see the danger signs; as the US/UK forces get angry and scared by the guerrilla fighting, they begin to lash out at civilians, so recruiting more and more people willing to attack them. It gets messy and before you know it you've got a full on war-of-occupation. They were hoping for Paris 1944, but its looking more like Saigon 1968, and we trust the people who planned this to lead our countries? Shame on us? Time to think for ourselves.