USATODAY.com - Military leaders question Iraq plan

You know, I'd wondered why the administration was suddenly so ambiguous about its Iraq plans. Not that there have ever been lots of details out there, but they'd been beating the drums for an invasion and then suddenly ... weren't.

Bush: 'I have no war plans on my desk': President Bush assured German leaders today that he does not seek war with Iraq but wants prevent President Saddam Hussein from forging alliances with al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Germany was not amused. Their defence minister made the point that, regardless of the merits of the plan that doesn't exist, Germany simply can't afford to make that sort of commitment to support the war on terrorism. (Or, to quote him: "We have no room for a new engagement." Whatever that means.)

Aside from the specific issue of Iraq, Defense seems to have a massive administration problem. I don't know what he did -- if anything -- but the military side seems to utterly loathe Rumsfeld. They don't like his plans -- the spectacular saga of the Crusader gun a particular case in point. (Although Rumsfeld may be winning that one, or so it seems at the moment.) Except for the whole "gays in the military" mess, they weren't nearly this publicly obstreporous under Clinton -- whom they also clearly disliked. Certainly not so early, anyway. (That said, even if Saddam could be toppled easily, I'd think that the military military would be slightly better judges of their readiness than the civilian leaders. THAT said ... it does nobody any good for the military side to fight with the civilian side.)

Purely as a side note: Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon: Microsoft Lobbies Hard Against Free Software. Not surprising. What is surprising is that it seems to have backfired rather badly: But the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded. "Banning open source would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DOD groups to protect themselves against cyberattacks," said the report, by Mitre Corp.

I wonder if this may mean that the Pentagon will take a position against the Senator from Disney's ... er, that is, Senator Hollings' intellectual property bill. After all, given military uses, they can't be happy at having their computers restricted that way. (In fact, I would think that, given even a second's thought, no govermnent office at any level would want a computer that hamstrung.)