Salon: The War According to David Hackworth

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The retired colonel calls Donald Rumsfeld an "asshole" whose bad planning mired U.S. troops in an ugly guerrilla conflict in Iraq. His sources? Defiant soldiers sending dispatches from the front.

Retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth is a cocky American military commander who for half a century was at the front lines of the Army's most important battles. Most recently, though, Hackworth has been at the front lines of a domestic war: the debate over U.S. military strategy in Iraq, and whether the Bush administration planned well enough to achieve a decisive military victory and keep the postwar peace.

Hackworth was everywhere on cable television during the first days of the war, when early military setbacks convinced him and other retired military leaders that the administration, whose backers sold the conflict as a "cakewalk," hadn't sent enough troops to quell Iraqi resistance. He wrote a widely quoted column headlined "Stuck in the Quicksand" in early April -- just as the tide seemed to turn and the pace of victory picked up again. Though he is a colonel by rank, Hackworth was counted among the so-called "television generals" the administration blasted after Baghdad fell, and many conservative admirers turned against him.

But now, with American soldiers still dying almost daily in Iraq, the tide of opinion may be turning again, in favor of Hackworth's argument that the administration was unprepared for what's turning out to be a long-term guerrilla resistance in Iraq. Today the primary front of Hackworth's war of opinion isn't cable television, but a pair of Web sites -- Soldiers for the Truth and his own site, Hackworth.com -- where he's campaigning to document the dire fate of U.S. troops in Iraq. The sites have quickly become a repository for the gripes and fears of America's beleaguered combat troops.

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"Soldiers are living in the dirt, with no mail, no phone, no contact with home, and no break from the daily monotony at all. I practically got in a fist fight with this captain over letting my private send an e-mail over his office's internet. This clown spends his days sending flowers to his wife and surfing the net. Fucking disgraceful and all too typical of today's Army."

"Soldiers get literally hundreds of flea or mosquito bites and they can't get cream or Benadryl to keep the damn things from itching ... .I am not talking about bringing in the steak and lobster every week. I am talking about basic health and safety issues that continue to be neglected by the Army."

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