I've been in big corporations my whole working life. I could see that, to a guy like Rumsfeld, the Haditha Marines were no more than bugs to be squashed if they got in the way of the counterinsurgency effort.
And even though Haditha story was all enemy propaganda, it'd better to squash the Haditha Marines than to try to battle the propaganda--especially with the worldwide media against the Bush Administration.
All of this is obviously just speculation on my part. But it should be obvious that the SecDef would care more about the success of the war effort than a squad of Marines.
While I may understand the motivation, it's apparent that neither Rummy or his staff thought through the impact this type of action would cause lacking any direct explanation of the reasons behind that decision. That type of attitude is what causes unions to walk, or non-union workforces to slow down or leave. While we may be willing to allow for the marketplace to determine winners and losers in the money game -- we cannot ever allow that attitude to determine our freedom in our civilization.
All of this is obviously just speculation on my part. But it should be obvious that the SecDef would care more about the success of the war effort than a squad of Marines.
And ironically, surrendering to the propagandists only encourages more of the same and ultimately undermines the war effort by demoralizing the troops and offering up free ammo to our domestic enemies in the Democrat party and its newsrooms, as well as to every socialist, anarchist, and malcontent in old Europe.
If your take on Rumsfeld's motivations is correct, then that assclown can go off and have himself a circle-jerk with Robert McNamara as far as I'm concerned.
I don’t understand why anybody is surprised that there was an over-reaction (in hindsight) to the Haditha story.
Let’s be honest with ourselves— when that story first broke it looked really *really* bad for those Marines. It was a nightmare. As difficult as it was to believe a lot of people DID believe it, and if you’ll recall even a lot of people HERE on FR believed it.
That the DOD swung into it with both feet is what they are *supposed* to do. They’d have been derelict if they hadn’t. It wasn’t until after the investigation that the facts of the case started to look pretty fuzzy, and the accusations began to fall apart, and charges started getting dismissed.
I hope Chessani comes out of this OK. As the one in command he’s going to be expected to have handled it differently. Unfortunately, his only failure was to fail to see into the future to see what a mess the story would be blown into. It’s not his fault that the story blew out of proportion, but it may end up being his responsibility. I’d hate to see that.
We’ll see. But the Marines and the DOD couldn’t have been expected to handle it much differently. There’s procedures for this sort of thing and they followed them. Maybe the Navy Sec is an @sshat. I don’t know.
>> I’ve actually always been a Rumsfeld fan but...
I’d like to know what McCain thinks about this. He’s taken a very hard line against Rumsfeld but this issue may be too ‘hot’ for McCain’s campaign rhetoric.