Posted on 06/21/2007 5:51:47 AM PDT by meandog
Donald Rumsfeld's pride went before his fall--and thousands of needless deaths
DONALD RUMSFELD gives Robert McNamara, chief architect of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam war policy, a good run for his money as worst U.S. defense secretary of modern times. Rumsfeld's competitiveness in this race is freshly illustrated in "Endgame," the newest episode of public television's unrivaled "Frontline" series.
The Middle East birthed the world's great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam. During the past 6 years Washington has produced lesser Gods of One, who believe that the world is as they say it is, or will be as soon as their divine breath falls on it. Regarding Iraq, the Bush presidency has contained three such deities--Mr. Bush himself, Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Rumsfeld, who likely has done the most harm to the nation through his willful mismanagement of the war.
How willful? "We didn't have a plan" for confronting an insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies tells "Frontline." To have had such a plan, in Mr. Rumsfeld's mind, would have been to mar the glorious victory for democracy he believed that the U.S.-led juggernaut would speedily win. "We never even considered an insurgency as a reasonable option," contritely confirms Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff who helped plan the takedown of Saddam.
(Excerpt) Read more at fredericksburg.com ...
We employed Nazi party members to operate the power stations and waterworks in post-War Germany. And it is my understanding that only SS totally verboten were Waffen politico types. And we quickly assembled the officer cadre into the new W. German army to counter the rise of monolithic Communism on its eastern border by having them recant oaths to Der Fuhrer and swearing to their country and constitution--something that should have been done in Iraq, IMO.
Rummy should be the GOP candidate for POTUS. He downsized the Pentagon getting rid of tax wasting positions and programs and he should do the same for the entire Federal apparatus. But alas the Dims, MSM, and the bureaucracy have got rid of him as a threat.
He'd have about as much chance at gaining the W.H. as Rosie O'Donnell would winning Donald Trump's Miss USA pageant.
Yes, Rummy’s reputation has been destroyed, but he SHOULD be POTUS. I doubt a case could be made that Rosie should be Miss USA, but I don’t really care.
And yet Iraq looks like genius when compared to Vietnam or WWII.
As I recall, it was the State Dept., not DOD that was calling the shots on how to handle the insurgent problem. Too much velvet (diplomatic) glove and not enough iron fist. All in the interest of the elections.
I realized that Wikipedia hasn't gained the reputable reputation of encyclopedias such as Brittanica but I do find it somewhat credibly unbiased in some regard...please click here for info on who was calling shots.
You forgot the part about Bremer imposing a Euro-style parliamentary democracy instead of letting the Iraqis design a Republic under parameters which would give them something like what we have, at least in the way of institutions.
The ammount of relevant information that is not in that wikpedia entry is staggering.
Regardless of the number of troops there several things that happened to create the problem that Rumsfeld had no control over.
First, there was an assumption that, like in Japan and Germany, there would remain a core of competent government officials that could continue the basic functions of government after the war. There was none. Both DOD and State, and everyone else thought this would be the case.
Second, the failure of the Turks to let us send the 4th ID in from the north caused a major change in the plan at the last minute. Instead of a classic “pincer” operation where we attack from north and south with additional troops, we had either wait two months for them to redeploy from the Med to the Gulf, or go with what we had in the gulf. The weather window dictated we not wait and do a Blitzkrieg from the south. This is a major point that everyone seems to forget.
Third, the “insurgency” was not home-grown. It was and still is mainly driven by “foreign” fighters being funneled in from Iran and Syria.
It was not believed by either DOD, or State, or anyone else, that Iran would make so large an effort to destablize.
Here, DOD’s hands are tied as to response. Even if you deployed every soldier in the US armed forces, you could not effectively close those borders AND conduct internal ops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should have started taking out military targets in both those countries as a warning to them, and Rumsfeld might even have suggested that (we don’t know). But we did not for political reasons.
We could also go into all the pros and cons of what a larger force would have meant initially to the people of Iraq. Are we liberators or occupiers? Those decisions came from State based on political concerns. It was thought that it was better to stand up new Iraqi forces as quickly as possible...
20/20 hindsight is great. Unfortunately it is just that. It is always easy to nitpick after the fact.
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