Posted on 11/05/2015 6:58:58 PM PST by lbryce
One of the benefits of being 91 is you don’t have to hold back anymore—you can say what you want. And in a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times.
“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,†the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.†He said Cheney built “his own empire.â€
“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here—iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,†George H.W. Bush said. (One takeaway from the book is Bush’s love of the phrase “iron-ass,†which seems at once like a dated Yankee descriptor and also delightfully vivid.)
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Its a tragedy that he was ever vice president.
Careful there. Don’t forget Jeb would kill and go to jail for his dad. ;-)
Well, I didn’t have to read far into the thread before
I found the post that expressed my thoughts about the
punching bag Bush family. Attack fellow Republicans while
Democrats including Obama and the Clintons piss all over
your leg. That’s the Bush family.
Yes, he certainly did.
Felix Unger?
“Except that no one could tell him anything. It was always his way, or the highway. Much of what went wrong during the invasion of Iraq can be laid at his feet. IMHO, history will view Donald Rumsfeld as it will view Robert McNamara.”
You might have a point. Rumsfeld is a mixed bag. Maybe too smart by half as they say. One cannot argue that Iraq was done well. Took over twice as long as WWII and wasn’t ever really safe.
The initial invasion was amazing, but the occupation was weak.
The tactic I hated most was years of convoys down unsecured MSRs getting merrily bombed into oblivion. Can anyone imagine Patton or ANY WWII general just letting a main supply line stay that insecure?
Insane.
I wonder what he has to say about Colin Powell?
That's exactly right. LBJ bungled Vietnam. But in his defense, LBJ had no past to guide him. He figured that, at worst, Vietnam would end like Korea did, in a stalemate.
But Bush II, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had history to guide them. They had the lessons of Vietnam to guide them. They chose to ignore those lessons. Why? Arrogance, pure and simple.
And so sooner or later, helicopters will take off from the rooftop of the American embassy in Kabul, just as they did in Saigon.
Oh, and one more thing. I will not blame Obama for the fall of Kabul, not anymore than I blame Gerald Ford for the fall of Saigon.
“Fuc Your Wing Man”...Yeb will narrate it ...
Makes me want to puke!
Very true. I recall reading about an incident a few days after Baghdad fell. An Iraqi general approached the Americans and said that he had under his control hundreds of Iraqi MP's, all able and willing to keep the peace.
We don't need you, and we don't want you, the American authorities said. Just shut up and go home. So instead of having hundreds of native policemen in our service, we had hundreds of angry, unemployed Iraqis just sitting at home. All of them offended, and all of them armed.
Contrast that with Patton's (sensible) approach to the occupation of Germany.
Goldwater got wobbly and at a point near the end his much younger 2d wife would talk to the press at the front door while Barry was asleep or under medication upstairs. She commented to the press that he had changed his position on abortion and other matters and the press dutifully reported that he had seen the light on such issues. When there was no evidence he had seen any light. He was just a senile old man and people were using him for their purposes. Bush? Just sayin’...
Wonder what files HE has. Must be some great stuff.
At least 40 senators deleted and shredded stuff galore, once Snowden’s leaks came out, along with the WH server hacks.
Chez Boots loves Rummy.
He was handed a military that was broken down and demoralized by the Clinton Administrations 8 year Jihad to destroy the United States military, an American institution that Bill Clinton “loathed the most” and and one Hillary Clinton loathed even more
Rumsfeld made very badly needed reforms to our Military to modernize our force structure for the 21st century.
He also fought and largely won a bitter war with the Generals and Admirals from the Clinton era of perfumed princes school of leadership who sold out their colleagues and collaborated with the Clinton's to destroy the military in return for power and position
Donald Rumsfeld was probably the best Sec of Defense we have had in my life time and his vision of what our modernized , post Cold War force structure should look like was very well thought out and spot on.
By comparison, Gates was a reactive, vision less disaster
Your quote...NOT mine!
EXPLAIN!!!!!!!!!!!
Im a believer in the “LaMay Doctrine!”
IMHO
I could not agree with you more there. It is said that democracies should go to war reluctantly, but fiercely.
LBJ ignored that, completely. And so did Bush II, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
Don't get me wrong. LBJ was a pig and a bastard. But Bush II, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are all good (but flawed) men. I would be happy to have any of those three as friends or neighbors.
But they bungled the Middle East, badly. We conservatives simply have to admit that to ourselves. Because otherwise those mistakes will be repeated. Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the saying goes.
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