We're watching Britney Spears crumble.. We're seeing Presidential campaign coverage 24/7 to the point where it's nausiating .. All the while a war rages on..

And now, new revelations are shocking --- at least to those paying attention.

The Associated Press reporting this morning: Hundreds of Marines may have been killed without reason due to fact they didn't have blast-resistant vehicles.. vehicles that were requested by commanders.. rejected by Marine Corps bureaucrats that refused the requests.. It wasn't until Defense Secretary Gates said MRAPs would be the Pentagon's number one acquisition priority..

The flawed Secretary Rumsfeld getting a lot of blame in the report, written by Franz J. Gayl..

"Budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by IEDs in late 2004 and early 2005 and were convinced the best solution was adding more armor to the less-sturdy Humvees the Marines were using. Humvees, even those with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the increasingly powerful explosives planted by insurgents. _ An urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of the vehicles. The Marines could not continue to take "serious and grave casualties" caused by IEDs when a solution was commercially available, wrote Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005. Gayl cites documents showing Hejlik's request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marine Corps' supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends. _ The Marine Corps' acquisition staff didn't give top leaders correct information. Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, was not told of the gravity of Hejlik's MRAP request and the real reasons it was shelved, Gayl writes. That resulted in Conway giving "inaccurate and incomplete" information to Congress about why buying MRAPs was not hotly pursued. _ The Combat Development Command, which decides what gear to buy, treated the MRAP as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans for equipment that was more mobile and fit into the Marines Corps' vision as a rapid reaction force. Those projects included a Humvee replacement called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and a new vehicle for reconnaissance and surveillance missions."

Without question, the news from Iraq has gotten better. But it's infuriating to think that since there's no bad news the media is not focusing on any news. Especially news of previous years' mistakes that cost lives .. lives forever gone and families back home now coping with whether or not they even had to die.

War is war.

But when we go to war, shouldn't we give our forces each and every ability to wage that war we seek for them to win? Shouldn't we give them every avenue to live and fight? Shouldn't we stop tying the old yellow ribbons to the oak trees and instead make materials that they could wear or vehicles they could drive in that would keep them safe?

This may all go back to how the war was introduced to the public: It was a PR campaign aimed at convincing people Saddam had nukes and weapons .. I distinctly remember journalists on TV ready with their chemical masks in case Saddam would launch some of his arsenal. Arsenal he didn't have.

The issue of mismanagement of this war should be one of the top campaign issues in 2008 .. and if John McCain keeps saying he wants us in Iraq for 100 years, maybe it will be. That's a lot of MRAPs. That's a lot of lives.