A buddy of mine still in the International Zone emailed me some pics of the ONE that had been taken when he visited Iraq during the election or shortly thereafter (sometime last fall). He said these pictures had circulated around the emails of the various units/DoD agencies/DoS. I opened them up and the first thing that stuck out, was every 'troop' in all the pictures were Air Force slackers. (A little background, 99% of the Air Force guys I talked to while I was in Iraq, never hesitated to mention how they hated being there, how they hated being in the military, how they hated they way they were treated by Soldiers/Marines, how they hated the long miserable tours of 6 months, how they hated work having to set at a desk all day, how they hated that the gym closed at 21:00, how they hated how the Iraq starch made their ugly blue combat uniforms smelled, how they hated that the dinning facility didn't serve cheese cake every night of the week, how they hated that when a dust storm came through, the porn channel on their satelite in their 'dorm room' stopped working...you get my point?....Now I know there are some highspeed, low drag Zoomies out there pulling the trigger and blowing stuff up, I just never ran across those guys in the IZ)
So, if you want to get some folks together that really HATE Iraq and hate the mission in Iraq; get a bunch of Air Force folks together that are stuck in the IZ. These are going to be the folks that will slob that knob for the 'ONE' if he tells them they will not have to go back to Iraq. If the 'ONE' were to go into the IZ and tell some DoD contractors or DoD civilians that this might be their last 'tour' in Iraq; that would imply that their 'gravy train' was about to come to a screeching halt and they would be mad as hell. Those civilians would not hestitate to tell him off, so of course there has to be some kind of behind the scenes crowd control going on.