JUST IN Rummy resigns!!
11:51 A.M. Wed
At long last, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has resigned. (and Prince George the Lesser has apparently accepted)
This amounts to someone kllling themselves just before police rush in and capture them. Unfortunately, Bush decided to keep Rummy in office for 6 years too long, despite long and loud calls from all quarters for Rummy to step down.
Only now that everyone hears the sound of approaching footsteps, does Bush finally make a nod towards reality and show Rumsfeld the door.
It spares Rumsfeld and Bush the certain humiliation of revelations and scorching testimony which would have surely emerged had the Democrats been allowed to hold hearings.
Replacement is to be former CIA chief Robert Gates, another throw-back to Daddy Bush and the past.
More as details come in.
**Note** On MSNBC as the anchor broke this news with a live reporter standing on the White House lawn, someone off camera there could be heard loudly singing, "Nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Heee-aaaayy, GOOD BYE!!" repeatedly.
Bush at his press conference was asked why he told reporters last week that Rumsfeld was going to stay for the rest of Bush's administration. Bush calmly explained why he LIED to reporters, saying that he wasn't going to "inject" such a decision into the election, and so, "the only way to get you off that question and on to another one was to give that answer."
This amazing admission of a bald-faced lie to the American people via the press was met with hardly a murmur. This is what it's come to in the administration of "morality". Try to even imagine if Clinton had calmly explained that he had knowingly lied to "get reporters off" a question that was harmful to Dem election prospects.
If anyone still doubts that Bush is a serial liar and has and will lie repeatedly for nothing more than political purposes, this should remove all doubt.
Your reaction, thoughts?
posted by The Inside Dope @ 11/08/2006
9 comments
9 Comments:
Robert Gates is a great pick. Probably couldn't find anyone better for the job at hand. He has a much different perspective toward foreign policy than Rumsfeld and Cheney and he'll also "play in the sandbox" much more effectively. I think it isolates Cheney as well.
I can understand the need to keep his mouth shut about it in the face of elections. I think he spent some hard time thinking about this move, and I really think his decision was made in the last week or so before the election.
What would the reaction had been if he had done this last week? My guess is that we wouldn't have talked about Kerry much, and it would have seemed very manipulative just before elections.
I find it deliciously ironic that Bush would instinctively choose to LIE for what he thought were political purposes.
Of course, he didn't need to blatantly lie and mislead the American people once more, but could have done what other presidents would have done, namely, weasel out of a direct answer somehow and played it coy.
But beyond his having no problem lying to the public for political purposes, consider this.
He lied and said he was sticking with Rumsfeld for the duration. He told this lie because he felt it would affect his party's chances in the election.
But the irony here is that his saying he was sticking with Rummy HURT Republican candidates.
He would have been better off telling the truth, or at least avoiding telling the lie.
IF he had intimated that he was considering replacing Rummy, I'm certain that more people may have felt a little more like voting Republican.
Instead he lied, it was yet another reason to think he'd lost his marbles and refused to change.
So in lying to avoid "interjecting" that issue into the election, he actually did more damage than if he had told the truth.
What qualifes you to determine truth? Do you have truthdar?
Excellent question, and one that no doubt many people ask themselves. In much the same way, I often wonder why gajillionaire musicians continue to tour or record, or actors act.
Two reasons spring to mind in Rummy's case, one honorable, one not so much.
It could be out of a sense of service to the country... but that's a stretch.
I think it's more an addiction to power and the remarkable prestige that goes with the gig. I mean, living like a modern day pasha with billions of dollars of toys and the world's strongest and largest military at your disposal has got to be the ultimate ego rush.
And like Cheney and others that have made a mess of everything, I think Rummy also carried a lot of outdated cold-war ideological baggage into the job.
He was determined to downsize and "transform" the military, only he wasn't flexible enough to realize that his dream wouldn't work in this situation. And that's only ONE failure on his part.
Rumsfeld has been the longest serving SecDef in this country's HISTORY!!!
And clearly, he should have gotten the hell out long ago.
Now we have another Daddy Bush protoge being tapped by Jr. But it simply couldn't be worse, and I think most people are very hopeful that Gates will improve things somehow.
(and speaking of wondering what someone's motives are, what in the HELL would possess someone to actually want to take over as SecDef and walk into this gigantic insoluble, un-winnable mess is beyond me.)
That's certainly a major school of thought, and one which I lean toward myself. And that is that the problem was that Rummy was determined to do Iraq on the cheap, so to speak, with a skeleton crew of minimal troop strength, all as part of his "reorganization" strategy. He clung to this like a drowning man to a log, despite the fact that it was a disasterous plan.
Truly, there's only two options as I see it (speaking very generally) and that is either do the Murtha thing and withdraw nearly all troops to "over the horizon" and monitor things, or send in MORE troops and get the situation in hand.
As you say, some suggest that we're already stretched so incredibly thin as it is, the only way we could possibly do this would be to re-institute the draft.
If there was a draft to begin with, the invasion never would have happened. Why? Because then even the children of priviledge would be getting blown to bits, and we can't have that.
This "we should have had more troops" or "they screwed up the invasion" or "they didn't have a plan" crap is a HORRIBLE argument--it's another way of trying to out-right-wing the Republicans. "Those half-assed Republican clowns don't know how to fight a REAL war... More troops! Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred thousand!" What's left unsaid in this argument? "They'll never attack us if they see how strong we are! We'll teach those terrorists a lesson! We'll crush the insurgency!" A load of crap.
This war was a horrible idea from the start, based on a mountain of lies. It was a gross violation of international law and norms--an attack on a country which had not attacked us, and which could not be in any position to attack us in the forseeable future. The Iraqi people had already suffered over a decade of sanctions that the two top UN coordinators and the head of the World Food in Iraq program resigned over (the first UN coordinator said the devastating effects of the sanctions on public health in Iraq, which he knew better than anyone else, met the definition of "genocide"). The Iraqis did not deserve the calamity of another war. Even without "incompetent" Republican leadership, in the "best" of conditions, how much destruction do you think the war would have caused? We can fantasize all we want about our "smart bombs" and our "surgical strikes", but war is war, and it causes immense suffering and destruction.
How much do you think we were prepared to pay to rebuild? Not long after the war, Bremmer came to the conclusion that damage to the Iraqi infrastructure caused by the war and the sanctions was so large that it was"almost impossible to exaggerate." Bremmer was not just playing the pawn of the corrupt contractors when he said that. Were or are the Democrats going to come up with some kick-ass get tough plan to solve that problem? Unlikely.
Another mistake this argument rests on was the idea tossed around before the war that we could easily and happily occupy Iraq just like we did with Japan. Well, a funny thing happened in the intervening years, called "the end of colonialism." People in Asia and Africa started to come to take an intense dislike of the idea of being ruled by Europeans (or Americans). No matter how much Iraqis might have hated Sadaam Hussein, they were never going to just sit quietly and accept the benevolent rule of the Great White Father in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad or the White House (let's quit the "sovereignty" charade, shall we?) The Iraqis thought from the start that we never would have attacked if they didn't have such huge oil reserves. And that suspicion turns out to have been...correct! How are we going to argue against that? What are we going to say? "Nah, man, you got us all wrong! We're doing this for you! We spent all this money to come over here and fight this war because we care about you! We love the Iraqi people, and we're willing to spend our blood and treasure to help them! We love you, man! Really!"
We're not getting killed there because we "didn't have a plan." What plan could we have had to conquer Iraq without doing any damage? What plan could we have had to pay for the war, occupation, and reconstruction? What plan could we have had to convince the Iraqis we weren't there for their resources? What plan could we have had to convince the Iraqi people that they should sit by and accept military rule by a hundred fifty thousand (or two hundred, three hundred, or four hundred thousand) 20-something year old American soldiers who don't know Arabic, don't anything about Islam, and who think they're in Iraq to get revenge for 9/11?
Putting more troops there was not and is not going to make it all better. They're still going to oppose us, as will many, many Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East who have long been angry about U.S. policies regarding Israel/Palestine in addition to our Iraq policy. The war was a catastrophe in its conception, and only continued to get worse. There was no way to "do it right." Invading, and indeed every day we stay in Iraq confirms Iraqis' worst suspicions about us. We were warned before the invasion (and before all of the supposed mistakes of Rumsfeld and others) that attacking Iraq would "open the gates of hell," and it appears that we have done just that for the people of Iraq. There will be young and old Iraqi men--nationalists, not terrorists--who will continue to attack our troops until we leave. Period.
TID,
Oh, you nailed. The important component--much more important than the identity of the SecDef--is the wanton lie. Now we have established for all times and the press is on notice of it. Our Gimpy Waterfowl president will lie, but only when it is absolutely convenient. Jeez, talk about tangled webs!
Thanks for your analysis
Why don't you just send a torrist a care package? When they come to your front door --- we know how you are going to go ---- with your hands in the air and on your knees! Woosssssyyyyy!
Thanks for the comment President Bush.
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