You really should read Professor Cole’s entire blog entry, but here’s some of the juiciest highlights:

Rumsfeld basically told this serviceman, “screw you!” Obviously “400 a month” is not going to resolve the problem to which the soldier pointed. And it simply is not true, as Rumsfeld implied, that soldiers in a tank are as much at risk as they are in an un-armored truck or other vehicle. There have been a number of reports of rocket-propelled grenades just bouncing off Abrams tanks. The soldiers know when they are being made fools of.

…let’s point out that the officer corps wanted to send more like 300,000 troops to Iraq in March of 2003, not the 100,000 that Rumsfeld insisted on. … and that the lack led to the orgy of looting, which the US was not in a position to stop and which there was not even much will to stop. The looting in turn paid for the incipient guerrilla war (and a good deal of the looting was from weapons depots like al-Qaqaa, despite the Bush administration’s denials).

…And then Rumsfeld ordered the Iraqi army itself dissolved… Why would you dump 400,000 trained soldiers into unemployment lines just after invading a country? And the dissolution of the Iraqi military ensured that the US troops would have to try to keep order in the country, a task for which they were not trained.