http://www.msnbc.com/news/971168.asp?0cv=CB20“Windbags of war,” quipped a television critic back in April as cable news airwaves normally filled with slick broadcasters were invaded by graying former generals. With American troops thrusting into Iraq, television networks put these retired officers on retainer to ride shotgun with their anchors. When several of them dared warn that the American war plan spread U.S. forces dangerously thin, the Pentagon quickly launched a broadside that all but accused them of undermining the war effort. Five months later, however, American troops are dying in a guerrilla war, more National Guard and reservists are being mobilized and the Bush team has few allies abroad willing to send their own sons into harm’s way. The “winds of war” appear to have shifted.
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Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an NBC News military analyst, Gulf War commander and Vietnam combat vet, became a lightning rod for such criticism when he warned in early March that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s battle plan, while likely to put American troops in Baghdad within 25 days, could result in a post-war situation much like the one that exists today.
McCaffrey and other military analysts offered their first real criticism of the “war plan” as American forces got caught up in bloody rearguard actions in mid-March trying to guard key junctions and bridgeheads at Nasiriyah and other towns in south-central Iraq.
Drawing on their knowledge of how such operations are supposed to unfold, McCaffrey and his colleagues — among them retired generals like Montgomery Meigs and Bernard Trainor on MSNBC, Wesley Clark on CNN Gregory Newbold at ABC News — worried aloud about the long-term implications of an army having trouble keeping open the vital arteries to its supply depots in Kuwait.
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