When hundreds of thousands of Americans poured onto the streets three years ago before the invasion of Iraq, they weren’t protesting the war on the grounds that it couldn’t be won. Rather, they were protesting because they knew it was an aggressive war, cloaked in the rhetoric of self-defense, and because they knew it would lead to massive amounts of unnecessary death and suffering.

Those hundreds of thousands of Americans have been largely missing in action ever since. In their place stepped first the Kerry campaign, and now the mainstream media in general. But the way the war is criticized has changed radically. With the admirable exception of Cindy Sheehan, who will speak at our campus tonight at 8 p.m., almost all discussion of the war has been confined to how well the Bush administration has been waging it.

This became strikingly clear this past week, with three days in a row of headlines describing the increasing number of current and retired generals lashing out at the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. While it would be nice to think that the generals are really just worried about the plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, first reported two weeks ago in both the Washington Post and the New Yorker, there is no indication that they are concerned with anything other than Rumsfeld’s failure to conquer Iraq.

While Rumsfeld has been unrepentant, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a “moderate,” has been more willing to admit mistakes. “What we didn’t do in the immediate aftermath of the war was to impose our will on the whole country with enough troops of our own, with enough troops from coalition forces or by re-creating the Iraqi forces, armed forces, more quickly than we are doing now,” Powell said back in September. Last week, he reiterated these regrets: “We made some serious mistakes in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad