The Guilty Men

Donald Rumsfeld in trouble again hardly makes headlines, but this really does seem to be another fine mess he's got himself and his mate Dick Cheney into. Now he has some of the most prestigious retired generals and military leaders in the US calling for him to go.

In a rather nonchalant response, Rumsfeld has cited the thousands of retired military men who haven't yet demanded his resignation. But when you have the former commander of the 82nd Airborne, the former commander of the 101st infantry, and the former head of CentCom, Anthony Zinni, against you, then surely you have to worry about them moving their tanks onto your lawn.

So far Bush is holding on to Rumsfeld for fear of opening up a hole in his government which can swallow up his vice president as well. However, we shouldn't be in doubt how serious this is: what the US military fear more than anything is that the disaster of Iraq can be repeated in Iran with even worse consequences spreading out across the region.

Rumsfeld is being blamed for ignoring military advice, underestimating the Iraqi resistance and refusing to fund enough troops for the occupation. Guilty on all counts, but he's not the only one. These same generals backed the illegal war without making their reservations public. The military has brought us Fallujah and Abu Ghraib.

None of them expected so much resistance, and none believed they would have to answer so many political questions domestically about the war.

Today the Financial Times and the Independent both have editorials calling for Rumsfeld to go. Not really very brave, is it, when even the US military are turning against the hawks, and when millions around the world drew this conclusion before we laid waste to a country killing more than 100,000.

One brave man is Flt-Lt Malcolm Kendal Smith, imprisoned for 8 months with costs of £20,000 for refusing to serve in Iraq. The court martial's verdict and the judge's summing up reeked of the establishment closing ranks. The 'orders are orders' line of the judge was expressly rejected at Nuremburg. But what the hell: we started an illegal war, now we've got to defend it.

The MOD tried to make out he was one odd isolated individual, a one man Stop the War campaign as a defence analyst told me on BBC's Good Morning Scotland. Now we know the isolated _and decidedly strange_ one is Donald Rumsfeld.