Thursday, November 04, 2004
Will it be business at usual for Bush and company, or will Bush move to unit a divided country? A Litmus test will be what happens with Rumsfeld. There is general bi-partisan agreement that serious mistakes have made in Iraq and that the person most responsible for these mistakes is Donald Rumsfeld and the cadre of Neo-Cons at the DOD.
The Slate’s Fred Kaplan lays out the case for such a test and the case against Rumsfailed and gang thus:
http://slate.com/id/2109132/
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith—their fingerprints are all over every smudge of this mess:
Two years ago, they set up their own intelligence operation, which pored over raw CIA data and "stove-piped" straight to the White House any tidbit that might remotely suggest that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or a link to al-Qaida, even when the professionals concluded otherwise.
In the preparations for invading Iraq, Rumsfeld whittled down the military's war plans to the barest minimum necessary to win on the battlefield, leaving nothing for securing the country afterward. Not even after the 3rd Infantry Division captured Baghdad International Airport did Rumsfeld fly in additional troops, military police, or materiel.
When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, testified that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed for post-combat security and stabilization, Wolfowitz publicly upbraided him, telling the same congressional committee that it was "hard to imagine" we'd need more troops to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq than we'd needed to topple Saddam's army.
All three (along with Vice President Dick Cheney, their abettor in the White House) torpedoed the State Department's elaborate plans for "postwar" operations, thinking they wouldn't be necessary because their man, Ahmad Chalabi, would be the exile on a white horse who would succeed Saddam on the throne, rally his millions of supporters, and lead Iraq toward Western-style democracy.
Meanwhile, before, during, and after the war, Rumsfeld gratuitously antagonized America's traditional allies who had opposed the Iraqi venture, deriding them as "Old Europe"—irrelevant remnants of an earlier era—and thus hardened their opposition to help us later, when Bush began to realize that he needed them after all.
Finally, Rumsfeld set in motion, covered up, and in the end did nothing to rectify the systems and procedures that led to the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, which probably inspired al-Qaida's single greatest recruitment drive of the year.
The Slate’s Fred Kaplan lays out the case for such a test and the case against Rumsfailed and gang thus:
http://slate.com/id/2109132/
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith—their fingerprints are all over every smudge of this mess:
Two years ago, they set up their own intelligence operation, which pored over raw CIA data and "stove-piped" straight to the White House any tidbit that might remotely suggest that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or a link to al-Qaida, even when the professionals concluded otherwise.
In the preparations for invading Iraq, Rumsfeld whittled down the military's war plans to the barest minimum necessary to win on the battlefield, leaving nothing for securing the country afterward. Not even after the 3rd Infantry Division captured Baghdad International Airport did Rumsfeld fly in additional troops, military police, or materiel.
When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, testified that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed for post-combat security and stabilization, Wolfowitz publicly upbraided him, telling the same congressional committee that it was "hard to imagine" we'd need more troops to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq than we'd needed to topple Saddam's army.
All three (along with Vice President Dick Cheney, their abettor in the White House) torpedoed the State Department's elaborate plans for "postwar" operations, thinking they wouldn't be necessary because their man, Ahmad Chalabi, would be the exile on a white horse who would succeed Saddam on the throne, rally his millions of supporters, and lead Iraq toward Western-style democracy.
Meanwhile, before, during, and after the war, Rumsfeld gratuitously antagonized America's traditional allies who had opposed the Iraqi venture, deriding them as "Old Europe"—irrelevant remnants of an earlier era—and thus hardened their opposition to help us later, when Bush began to realize that he needed them after all.
Finally, Rumsfeld set in motion, covered up, and in the end did nothing to rectify the systems and procedures that led to the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, which probably inspired al-Qaida's single greatest recruitment drive of the year.
Comments:
I think the fact that they fired Powell's Fixer, who came in behind Bremmer to clean up the mess pretty much answers your question.
see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29206-2004Nov5.html
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see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29206-2004Nov5.html
