|
|
Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
The Downfall of Donald Rumsfeld
 Wed Dec 15, 2004 3:55 am
|
 |
|
RUMSFELD MAY SOON REGRET HIS ARROGANCE TOWARD U.S. TROOPS
Mon Dec 13,12:41 PM ET
By Georgie Anne Geyer
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- By the early 1970s, after seven long and savage years of fighting in Vietnam, the phrase that came to characterize the pitiful hopelessness and absurdity of that conflict was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Unbelievably, our secretary of defense has just given us the existential phrases for the Iraq war: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
How could Donald Rumsfeld, a smart and savvy man despite his perverse fascination with conflict, possibly say such an insulting and arrogant thing to American soldiers? Is he really trying to tell them, as it surely sounded last Wednesday when he addressed American troops in Kuwait, that they are not the Army he wanted, but he had to put up with them?
Well, just maybe, if the cavalier attitude of the civilians in this administration toward American troops continues, there will come a time when our soldiers will not put up with THEM! Perhaps that was beginning last week in Kuwait.
To briefly review, one soldier in Kuwait, Spc. Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted "Rummie" with a pointed question. "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait," he said. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?
"We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal ... that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat."
Rumsfeld then made his incredible comment, pointing out to any rational person the degrees to which this administration is not so much lacking battlefield intelligence but basic human instinct. Even President Bush, whose own responses to the troops, despite his melodramatic public "emotion," are cool and distant, seemed to realize that Rumsfeld had gone too far.
"If I were a soldier overseas wanting to defend my country," he said from Washington, "I'd want to ask the secretary of defense the same question." (At this point, some of would like to ask him the question of why, as commander in chief, he hasn't asked it himself?).
Then it was revealed that the question had been worked out in concert with a journalist covering the troops, Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press -- and this fact was somehow meant to discredit the whole encounter. Sorry about that! Such exchanges of ideas -- and especially of complaints -- are not only part of the war scene, they are central and appropriate to it.
But let us not forget the context of Rumsfeld's words. This is Rumsfeld's war -- not America's, but his. He and his pugnacious neocon cohorts -- all of them still reigning in the Pentagon, and none of whom having ever served in the military -- ran all around the uniformed military's and the State Department's warnings about this war. They got exactly what they asked for: an adventure, a thoroughly unnecessary "war of choice," and a growing disaster-in-the-making.
Senators Joseph Biden Jr. and Chuck Hagel just returned from Iraq, saying that not one American general said we were winning. Other warnings are the same. Rumsfeld's answer to everything is to train Iraqi forces to take the place of ours (perhaps because we, poor guys, only have "the Army we have"), but they are falling apart in many Iraqi cities.
And then Rumsfeld made things even worse. Responding to questions as to why he did not even remotely anticipate these intense "insurgencies," he answered blithely: "I don't think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you'd be in the degree of insurgency you're in today." No look at Iraqi history, no attempt to match ambition to potential, no common sense --and surely no apologies!
You can see the anger beginning to build in the armed forces, with the "stop-loss" policies that force men and women to stay in uniform long after their terms are over, with the callousness about the armor, with the ludicrous analysis by the civilians in the Pentagon of what Iraq and its history were really like.
Now his unfortunate quote will go down in history to show how much he and his group, most of them remote and self-interested intellectuals, look at battlefield soldiers as chess pieces at their disposal. In the end, they care about nothing except their game. |
| |
|
|
Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
|
Fri Dec 17, 2004 12:15 am
|
|
|
Rumsfeld hit by a Right hook
By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 16/12/2004)
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, faced a blistering attack from the Right yesterday as an influential neo-conservative figure accused him of "breathtaking arrogance" and called for him to resign.
William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement, said no wartime defence secretary had ever "so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck".
There is renewed speculation that Mr Rumsfeld may step down
In particular he savaged Mr Rumsfeld's airy response last week to criticism from soldiers in Iraq over the lack of equipment and resources.
The assault fuelled speculation that the defence secretary may step down long before the end of President George W Bush's second term.
The White House resisted calls to sack Mr Rumsfeld over the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal last year, partly because of concern that to fire him would undermine Mr Bush's re-election campaign.
Mr Rumsfeld is keen for a chance to rehabilitate his reputation, and also to see through his planned overhaul of the Pentagon.
The thinking is that the White House is keen to keep him until after next month's Iraqi elections. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said Mr Bush thought Mr Rumsfeld was doing a "great job" in a time of war and "we appreciate" his leadership.
Yesterday's assault on Mr Rumsfeld is linked in Washington to the ambitions of Senator John McCain, the maverick, hawkish Republican, who said this week he had lost confidence in the Pentagon chief. He is thought to be positioning himself as a putative opponent of Mr Bush in the event of a disaster in Iraq, and line himself up as a successor in 2008. |
| |
|
|
 
|
|
All times are GMT. The time now is Sat May 26, 2012 5:20 pm
|
|
|
|
|
Login
