Is criticizing Bush treason? Tell it to the Marines. A reader points out that "Nothing but Lip Service," an Army Times editorial that denounces attempts by the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress to nickel-and-dime members of the U.S. armed services, also appeared in Marine Corps Times.

The same reader also refers me to military.com, where William S. Lind has been publishing quite a few columns that are highly critical of Bush administration policy -- among them "Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence" ("It may be -- though I doubt it -- that our intelligence agencies really believed Saddam had all that stuff. But even if that is what they reported to the decision-makers, the decision-makers should have known better to swallow it. If they did not know that, they are not fit to be making military decisions. They lack the most basic understanding of the nature of military intelligence") and "Of Time and the Rivers" ("The promised American 'rebuilding' of Afghanistan has become a stale joke, because without security, nothing can be rebuilt. And America hasn't a clue on how to provide security in Afghanistan"). Back in 1989, Lind was the lead author of a Marine Corps Gazette article, "The Changing Face of War," which speculated on the nature of a future ("fourth") generation of warfare (it's dense reading, but if you're interested you can read it here). Lind thinks Saddam may have made a deliberate choice to lose what we think of as the Iraq War, as he explained (nearly two months ago) in "Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?": "Rather than fight for Baghdad, he decided to preserve himself and his most loyal military forces as a 'force in being' and, rather than attempting to hold on to the country, let the Americans take it, then re-take it from them through guerilla warfare." (This is similar to the speculations of Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel, in an op-ed piece first published in The Washington Post in April.)

In case you think Lind is a closet pinko, let me point out that he directs the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the very right-wing Free Congress Foundation. (I will note for the record that the head of the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich, opposed the Iraq War.)