Posted on 12/22/2004 11:30:15 AM PST by bob808
Last year, Midge Decter, wife of Norman Podhoretz, who has been howling for "World War IV" against the Arabs, published a mash note titled, "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait."
The University of Houston's James D. Fairbanks began his review thus:
"Neoconservative writer Midge Decter sets out to explain just what it is about Donald Rumsfeld that has well-educated, sophisticated women swooning over him.
Those unaware that Rumsfeld mania has been sweeping the country have obviously not attended the same fashionable dinner parties as Decter. Her book begins with a description of one such party where women sat around gushing over the secretary like smitten schoolgirls."
Well, the neocon girls may not be over their infatuation, but the Beltway neocon boys surely are. Last week, in what qualifies as the backstab of the year, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard called for Rumsfeld's firing.
Contrasting the "magnificent performance" of our "terrific army" with Rumsfeld's blunders and buck-passing, Kristol wrote: "Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term. ... [American] soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."
If Kristol sought to wound Rumsfeld, his timing was perfect. Rumsfeld had been bleeding for a week after his flat-footed answer to Tennessee National Guardsman Thomas Wilson at an assembly of troops in Kuwait. Wilson demanded to know why he and his fellow soldiers have to scrounge around junkyards for "hillbilly armor" to protect their trucks and humvees.
Rumsfeld's condescending response – "As you know, you have to go to war with the army you have, not with the army you might wish to have" – might have been acceptable, had Iraq not been a war of choice for which we had a year to prepare. It might have been understandable, a year ago, as the unanticipated insurgency erupted across Iraq.
But this administration had Iraq in its gunsights three years ago. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are thus responsible for any lack of armor that has resulted in the woundings and deaths of U.S. soldiers in unprotected vehicles from the roadside bombs that have become a major killer of American troops.
Nonetheless, when one considers all that Rumsfeld has done for the neocons, the depth of the betrayal astonishes.
Ever since he signed on with their Committee on the Present Danger in the 1980s, Rumsfeld had been a hero to neocons. In 1998, he signed Kristol's open letter to Clinton calling for war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. Named defense secretary, Rumsfeld brought in neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith as his No. 2 and No. 3, and let them fill the building with friends from Neocon Central, the American Enterprise Institute.
Richard Perle was given the chair of the Defense Policy Review Board, which was turned into a neocon nest at the Pentagon. In the hours after 9-11, Rumsfeld made the case to Bush for immediate war on Iraq. When Baghdad fell in three weeks, he was the toast of the cakewalk crowd and the centerfold of Midge and the neocon girls.
Now many are snaking on him. What is going on? Simple.
Rumsfeld is being set up to take the fall for what could become a debacle in Iraq. As the plotters, planners and propagandists of this war, the neocons know that if Iraq goes the way of Vietnam, there will be a search conducted for those who misled us and, yes, lied us into war, and why they did it. Rumsfeld has become the designated scapegoat.
His clumsy response to Wilson is not the real reason Kristol's crowd wants him out. As Kristol told the Post, Rumsfeld's "fundamental error ... is that his theory about the military is at odds with the president's geopolitical strategy. He wants this light, transformed military, but we've got to win a real war, which involves using a lot of troops and building a nation, and that's at the core of the president's strategy for rebuilding the Middle East."
To neocons, this war was never about WMD or any alleged Iraqi ties to 9-11. That was merely to mobilize the masses for war. Their real reason was empire and making the Middle East safe for Israel.
President Bush had best recognize what Kristol is telling him. The neocon agenda means escalation: enlarging the Army, more U.S. troops in Iraq, widening the war to Syria and Iran, and indefinite occupation of the Middle East, as we forcibly alter the mindset of the Islamic world to embrace democracy and Israel.
If that entails endless expenditures of tax dollars of U.S. citizens and the blood of U.S. soldiers, the neocons are more than willing to make the sacrifice. But if Bush himself fails to deliver, rely upon it. He, too, will get the Rumsfeld treatment from this crowd, parasitical and opportunistic as it is, as it seeks another host to ride, perhaps John McCain.
What does one expect, when one signs on with such duplicitous characters...
To me, that's what the main problem with Kristol is -- nobody at the White House is listening to him or returning his calls; he thought he was going to get a cushy job over there.
Bill Kristol has been stabbing Bush in the back since 1999.
I don't think Rumsfeld should resign (unless possibly he is replaced by Tommy Franks), but IMHO we should have done a better job anticipating that post-invasion Iraq would be chaotic, and dangerous, and we should have planned up front to have the troops and the equipment in place as soon as possible. We showed after Pearl Harbor that the U.S. was capable of rapidly building up both men and machinery to meet the task at hand. In this case, it appears that we're lagging in supplying of necessary materials, and we're scrounging for troops (even sending OpFor from Fort Irwin which is astounding).
We should have been planning to expand the size of our armed forces two-years ago to not only recover from the Clinton years, but to support a long-term committment to Iraq, it doesn't seem as that has been done.
So in that respect, the criticism of Rumsfeld is far. However, I don't know if anyone would have done better, and there are far more areas where Rumsfeld has done a tremendous job, force re-alignment for one. The efforts to get him removed IMHO are nothing more than grandstand by a group of pols who smell blood in the water.
Missed that report, ....
Buchanan has his head so far up the butt of classic anti-Semitism it is starting to look like a psychological issue for him. Look at these monolithic neo cons (Jews). Does Bill Kristol agree with Norm Podhoretz on every issue? Buchanan takes a group of people who share some common beliefs, makes sure to only mention the Jews among them, builds them into a monolithic group with marching orders presumably coming from Jerusalem. So we have the disloyal, backstabbing Jews. What we really have here, is another loser blaming Jews for his problems. Buchanan is not original, just pathetic.
Since Iraq has not been tied to 9/11 and does not have WMD, I am always baffled by those who defend the perpetrators of those lies. And the primary method of defense is simply to throw out the "anti-semite" label. If being an "anti-semite" means you would put your own nations interest above that of Israel, then count me among them. Buchanan has been one of only a small handful of conservatives who have had the courage to stand up to the neo-cons and call them on their game. I applaud his courage.
If you believe we are in Iraq as the result of some Jewish conspiracy you are an anti Semite but your problems go much deeper than that. You would be a delusional fool.
Were we, or were we not, lied into this war?
No arguement there, but what would forums such as this be without monday morning quarterbacking. :-)
Depends on how you want to look at it. Our leaders didn't lie, they went on the best information available and democrats and republicans reached the same conclusion.
However, if you want to look at where the information came from, it wouldn't surprise me if Chalabi's crew fed back intel into our system in order to drive momentum for the invasion.
Regardless, we're long past arguing whether or not the invasion was "right" or "wrong". We have a mission to complete, and a lot of brave fighters to support.
You're absolutely right about that. I was just responding to Honestfreedom's post that I was some kind of delusional Jew hater. There was bad intel, but to make matters worse Feith & Co. set up the "Office of Special Plans" to cherry pick and feed the most incriminating evidence to the president, regardless of accuracy. If he thinks there wasn't an agenda being pursued here, then he is the delusional one here.
If you think Feith made the decision or was the driving force behind this war you are the delusional one. How about all the info from the CIA which is about as friendly to Jews as the UN? Remember the CIA chief, who is definitely not Jewish, telling President Bush that WMDs were a slam dunk? I don't have a problem if someone wants to criticize Feith, or Perle, or Wolfowitz or anyone else. Where I see the lunacy is when they put them together into a conspiracy directed from Israel or for Israel.
No one person was the single driving force behind this. Feith, however, was one of the key driving individuals. He was even drafting foreign policy papers for Netenyahu (see "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm")
How about all the info from the CIA which is about as friendly to Jews as the UN? Remember the CIA chief, who is definitely not Jewish, telling President Bush that WMDs were a slam dunk?
So what about it? You, in your own mind, have mistaken me for being anti-Jewish. I am not. I am anti-neocon, regardless of their ethnicity.
"I don't have a problem if someone wants to criticize Feith, or Perle, or Wolfowitz or anyone else. Where I see the lunacy is when they put them together into a conspiracy directed from Israel or for Israel."
Ok, then back to previous question. Were we, or were we not, lied into this war?
No, we were not unless you want to believe the Michael Moore view of things. Who lied about what? Everyone from Clinton, the UN, the CIA, neighboring states, thought Saddam had WMDs. If he did not have them then they were all wrong or all lying. I doubt if most of that crew lied to get us into Iraq. Are you back to a conspiracy coming out of Jerusalem?
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