Originally posted by: Obiwampa

Things that were Bush's fault:

Letting Bin Laden escape our grasp in Afganistan

Rushing troops into said country without proper body armor or training

Ignoring the Geneva convention, creating the atmosphere for horrors like Abu-Ghraib

Jump up my butt. Our Army -- and I'll throw a bone to the Marines, the Squids, and the Zoomies -- is the best trained and equipped in the world. No one "let" bin Laden escape; he used a well-established military and paramilitary along with prepared positions and civilian allies to escape. Capturing people like him isn't like serving a warrant on your slovenly wife-beating father; if it were that easy, maybe your buddy Clinton would've done it instead of desultory standoff strikes.

With regards to body armor, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want. There will always be another wonderful new Miracle Technology that we should've waited for besides executing a mission; that's the nature of technology, it's always advancing. If it weren't the IBA and the uparmored HMMWVs, it would've been the ACU, or the ACH, the XM8, the 6.8mm Remington, and on and on ... we could've been sitting here in 2008 arguing about how the last year in Iraq was a failure because the BBs weren't taken out of mothballs or the F-35s' avionics weren't debugged.

And if you do want to bitch and moan about armor, consider the wisdom of using infantry in a daytime urban raid without an armor cordon. I think there was a movie about that a few years back.

With regards to the Geneva Conventions, Law of War training takes place at all echelons, starting with Initial Entry Training. A few junior enlisted and NCOs decided to break those rules, and they've been punished. The only "horror" was the propaganda victory this handful of criminals handed to Baathist and Salafist terrorists. (And maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I'm not sure how to determine that someone is hors de combat if they were never legal combatants and commit violence against their jailers. I'm sure I could find it on paper if I looked hard enough.)

You know, I take that back. The multiple Al Qaeda attacks on Abu Ghraib that killed many prisoners were the real horrors there, clearly in violation of the Law of War. And the countless Iraqis killed by the Baathist government. But you don't see hundreds of J school grads waxing morose about that. White people sexually harassing brown people sells more papers than brown people killing brown people. They're expected to do it, I guess.

You are demonstrably wrong about a number of other things, including the criminal butchering of our language ("ect," indeed!), but questioning the competence of the Army earns you a lecture and derision. Repost whatever you want from Move On, Truth Out, Al Jazeera, Democrat Underground, I don't care ... but stand by for corrections.