From the Hey!-Why-Didn't-We-Think-of-That File ...

Well, knock me over with a feather and slather me in canola oil. The Pentagon's chief curmudgeon, Grampaw Rumsfeld, has heard back from a senior policy board he asked to study the issue of nation-building in Iraq, and
guess what?

The Defense Science Board has returned with all sorts of nutty-crazy ideas that the Pentagon evidently didn't stop to consider much before the war ...

F'r instance, the panel suggests:

• The U.S. State Department not be shut out of nation-building efforts, as had been the case.
• The U.S. deploy 20 occupation troops for every 1,000 citizens, which would put our force in Iraq at closer to 500,000, instead of the estimated 150,000 troops currently there.
• Nation-building be undertaken with exhaustive pre-invasion preparation, adding that the learning of culture and mastery of language skills be approached with the same seriousness as combat skills.

Note to Rummy: Deploy the Defense Science Board to Fallujah.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James "Ron" Helmly, worries that his troops are "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."

"I do not wish to sound alarmist," he wrote in the December, 2004, memo. "I do wish to send a clear, distinctive signal of deepening concern."

Geez, how many more signals does the administration need? If Dubya had been at Mount Horeb and stumbled upon the burning bush, no doubt he would have ended up roasting mashmallows.