Military coup, anyone?

Following a couple links from AmericaBlog, we have two stories that, when you put them together, are really pretty frightening. First, there's this:

The Bush administration is studying options for military strikes against Iran as part of a broader strategy of coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran to abandon its alleged nuclear development program, according to U.S. officials and independent analysts...

Preparations for confrontation with Iran underscore how the issue has vaulted to the front of President Bush's agenda even as he struggles with a relentless war in next-door Iraq. Bush views Tehran as a serious menace that must be dealt with before his presidency ends, aides said, and the White House, in its new National Security Strategy, last month labeled Iran the most serious challenge to the United States posed by any country.

So, despite being knee-deep in Iraqi quagmire and sinking further all the time, Commander Chimpy wants to start a second war. The problem?

Army faces a major officer shortage

Army Capt. Jeanne Hull put in her walking papers after 10 months in Bosnia and logging back-to-back stints in Mosul and Baghdad that ran two years.

Tired of war and ready for something new, the West Point graduate set her sights on graduate school. She wasn't alone.

"A lot a lot of my classmates, if they are not out already, a lot of them want to get out," said Hull, 27, of Colorado Springs, Colo.

The Army expects to be short 2,500 captains and majors this year, with the number rising to 3,300 in 2007. These officers are the Army's seed corn, the people who 10 years from now should be leading battalions and brigades.

"We're ruining an Army that took us 30 years to build," Republican maverick Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told a group of reporters at a recent conference.

So having beaten the current army into the ground and driven off essential personnel, the Chimpster is still set on more combat, which raises the obvious question: At what point might the current American military commanders just crack and holler, "Enough!". Is it conceivable that they could, en masse, finally just put their collective foot down and demand that the current buffoon, Donald Rumsfeld, be removed?

Under normal conditions, this sort of mutiny would be unthinkable, but these are most emphatically not normal times. Could this actually happen? And what would be the consequences?

WHOA. What a coincidence.