Subject: Re: Kuwait Air Defenses Down US Jets
But to say that there was no planning here or poor planning is asinine. As in, completely ignorant. No one here knows what exactly happened.

There's a doctrine in the law called res ipsa loquitor, which literally means "the thing speaks for itself" in latin. Basically, it means that if something happens that is so fundamentally not supposed to happen without something terribly gone wrong, there is a presumption that something has gone terribly wrong. In other words, in the most common context it means that when something happens that should not have happened without someone being negligent, the court/jury is allowed to presume that someone has been negligent.

If three fighter jets get shot down from friendly fire, and that's something that should not happen absent some failure of planning or coordination or something on the part of the military, then it's rational for us to presume that there has been some failure of planning or coordination or something. Of course we won't know for quite some time, but that's a fair starting point for so unusual an occurrence - if three fighters get shot down by your ally, something has gone really wrong that should not have.

Contrary to LM's rather strident assertion, there's nothing ghoulish about pointing this out as a possible problem with how the Administration approached the run-up to the war. You've had far less public activity in assembling a "Coalition of the Whatever" compared to our last two major military operations in the theater. It's not out of line to note that this is a major failure in the conduct of the initial operation.