Some people knew it would take a million...

Reading James Fallows in the upcoming Atlantic, I came upon his piece "Blind into Baghdad" from nearly six years ago. About half way down you'll read someone quoting General Eric Shinseki:

Guys like Shinseki, who had been in Bosnia [where he supervised the NATO force], been in Kosovo, started running the numbers and said, 'Let's assume the world is linear.' For five million Bosnians we had two hundred thousand people to watch over them. Now we have twenty-five million Iraqis to worry about, spread out over a state the size of California. How many people is this going to take?

Thomas White
Secretary of the Army during Gulf War II
quoted in "Blind into Baghdad"
(J. Fallows, Atlantic, January/February 2004)

Wow, 200,000 US soldiers for 5 million Bosnians, and there are 25 million Iraqis. That's a million US Army regulars required, assuming the world is linear -- which it's not. I'm sorry, but Donald Rumsfeld is clearly a traitor, sending our boys (and girls) into Iraq in insufficient numbers, with insufficient armor. How many deaths is that criminal responsible for?

Heck, by the 2004 election even I knew that "W" had to go. Looking at recent history I just feel ill.

On the other hand, as I told a friend last week, "As a Christian I am not worried. No world lasts forever, much less a nation-state. But as an American I'm quite concerned" about our future.