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Well,
it’s official: Don Rumsfeld has been declared the fall guy for the Bush Administration’s
prosecution of the War in Iraq. What was that, you ask? “Who made the declaration?”
Why, it was those unlikely bedfellows, William Kristol, the New York Times, and Norman Schwarzkopf (Gen., US Army, ret.).
Apparently, everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, has been President Rumsfeld’s
fault: He sent insufficient numbers of men to fight the war, he was responsible
for the torture at Abu Ghraib, and worst of all, he was insufficiently deferential
to the G.I. who asked him at a December 8 public assembly in Kuwait why all
U.S. supply vehicles are not armored. What was once seen as refreshing candor
is now attacked as “flippancy.”
Don Rumsfeld is a tough guy who doesn’t need me playing sob sister … but
I will, anyway. The man certainly has flaws, which include being deaf to
any subordinate who has original ideas, and fails to sing along with his
choir of admirers; and using an auto-signature machine to sign letters to
the families of soldiers killed in action. And yet, as far as I can see,
the new campaign to run the Secretary out of Washington on a rail -- how
many have there been? I’ve lost track -- has nothing to do with any screw-ups
of his.
The New York Times’ role in this is the most obvious: They have always
hated Rumsfeld, because: 1. He is an aggressive, Republican advocate for
the President’s policies; and 2. See 1.
Since President Bush’s convincing re-election victory, the Times (i.e.,
its communist publisher, Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr.) has done everything
but demand openly, that he clear out all Republican cabinet members, and
replace them with Democrats hell-bent on sabotaging his administration. (If
Sulzberger’s apparatchiks had a lick of sense, they’d leave that job to the
President, who after letting Arlen Specter get Judiciary, and promoting an
illegal immigration amnesty plan anew, seems to be doing quite well, on that
front. But then, if they had any sense, they wouldn’t be Sulzberger flunkies.)
Sulzberger has given Rumsfeld the full Times treatment: Open condemnation
in his house editorials and by his lefty op-ed columnists, and thinly veiled
condemnation by his “reporters.” On December 19, op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd sank so low, as to abuse Frank Capra’s movie, It’s a Wonderful Life,
in a pathetic attempt at satire. Contradicting the spirit of Capra’s classic,
Dowd argued that the world would have been a much better place, had Rumsfeld
never been born.
In Dowd’s fantasy, the current secretary of defense is Democrat Sam Nunn,
who “consults with Congress.” I’ve followed every president since Nixon,
and I can’t recall a single defense secretary who “consulted with Congress.”
But Dowd doesn’t mean “consult with Congress,” anyway. She means “get bossed
around by Congress.”
[Nunn]
caught Osama back in '01. He threw 100,000 troops into Afghanistan on 9/11
and sealed the borders. Our Special Forces trapped the evildoer and his top
lieutenants at Tora Bora. You weren't at that cabinet meeting the day after
9/11, so nobody suggested going after Saddam. No American troops died or
were maimed in Iraq. No American soldiers tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
No Iraqi explosives fell into the hands of terrorists.
According
to Dowd, in the real world, Dick Cheney “anointed himself 43's vice president,”
but in her fantasy, without Rumsfeld in the Nixon Administration, Cheney
never got the chance.
W.
chose Chuck Hagel as his running mate. So without you and Dick there to dominate
him, he was guided by his dad and Brent Scowcroft, who kept Condi in line.
Colin Powell was never cut off at the knees and the U.N. and allies were
never bullied. There was never any crazy fever about Iraq or unilateralism
or "Old Europe." Here's Colin now, heading for the Oval Office.
POWELL: Merry Christmas, Mr. President. With the help of our allies around
the world, we have won the war on terror. And Saddam has been overthrown.
Once Hans Blix exposed the fact that Saddam had no weapons, the tyrant was
a goner. No Arab dictator can afford to be humiliated by a Swedish disarmament
lawyer.
Never
mind that our problems “catching” Osama bin Laden in 2001, were due to President
Bush eschewing unilateralism, in favor of delegating much responsibility
to the Afghan Northern Alliance. Or that it is logistically
impossible for America to “throw 100,000 troops” into any country in less
than several weeks’ time, or to ever seal Afghanistan’s borders, with any
amount of troops. Not to mention that for weeks after 911, Dowd’s newspaper
-- with her support -- tried to sandbag Bush out of sending ANY soldiers
to Afghanistan, warning that it would be a “quagmire” in which we would be
whipped and humiliated! (This was not Sulzberger & Co.’s fear, but their
hope.) Or that Bush required no prodding from Rumsfeld, to focus on Saddam
Hussein. Or that until recently, there were no weapons in Iraq of any interest
to Dowd. And the biggest “or” of all: That far from being dominated by Rumsfeld
and Cheney, Bush didn’t even ask them if he should go to war against Iraq.
But it gets worse. Prior to the war, Hans Blix had insisted (along with everyone
in both parties) that Saddam had tons of biological and chemical weapons.
And note the passive construction: “Colin Powell was never cut off at the
knees and the U.N. and allies were never bullied.” Cut off by whom? Bullied
by whom? Dowd has to go passive, in order to avoid naming George Bush, the
guy who according to her, is so passive that Dick Cheney forced his vice-presidential
candidacy on him (how does one do that?), yet who cuts off people at the
knees and bullies “allies” like Germany and France.
In her anti-Capra fantasy, all of Dowd’s ruminations assumed that Bush was
the president. But she has long insisted that the U.S. Supreme Court illegitimately
“chose” Bush as president. So, shouldn’t it be Al Gore who sent 100,000 troops
to Afghanistan on 911, caught Osama bin Laden, won the war in Afghanistan,
and never waged war on Iraq? There I go again, invoking logic, facts, and
coherence, factors that are banned in Dowdland.
Oops. But according to Dowd, we weren’t supposed to send ANY troops to Afghanistan.
In Josh Chafetz’ essay, “The Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd,” in the October
25, 2002 Weekly Standard, he shows Dowd playing the Times’ pre-Afghanistan “quagmire” script to the hilt.
On
October 28, 2001 [during the Afghanistan campaign], she asked “Are we quagmiring
ourselves again?" Of course, she didn't offer an answer or any suggestions
as to how to get out of a quagmire, if, indeed, we were in one. A week later,
on the strength of a single misstep (the murder of CIA-friendly Abdul Haq),
she wrote, "We're sophisticated; they're crude. We're millennial; they're
medieval. We ride B-52's; they ride horses. And yet they're outmaneuvering
us." No doubt spurred into action by Dowd's prod, American-backed forces
captured Mazar-i-Sharif five days later, and Kabul fell four days after that.
Just over a month after Dowd informed us that we were being outmaneuvered,
the Taliban's last stronghold, Kandahar, fell.
In
Dowd’s Rumsfeld-free fantasy, American troops did not torture Iraqis at Abu
Ghraib. In the real world, with Rumsfeld, American GIs also did not torture
Iraqis.
Don Rumsfeld is still defense secretary, last I noticed. It never occurred
to Maureen Dowd that you have to win, before you can gloat over your victory.
Perhaps in her universe, carts pull horses.
A New Godfather?
Even neoconservative William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, has demanded Rumsfeld’s ouster; in the December 15 Washington Post, Kristol called on President Bush to fire the Secretary. The next day, alleged reporter Todd Purdum quoted Kristol in the New York Times
as saying, "For me, it's the combination of the arrogance and the buck-passing
manifested in that statement [to Spc. Wilson], with the fundamental error
he's made for a year and a half now. That error, from my point of view, 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…. His stubborn attachment to his particular military theory has really
hurt the nation's ability to carry out its foreign policy."
In the Post,
Kristol wrote, “In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system
of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian
leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after
a fashion: ‘I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person
and I guess that's fine.’ Except he fails to take responsibility….
“These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.”
Kristol
ignores the fact that the “top person” is President Bush. And well he must.
As a courtier, Kristol (whose father, Irving, is called “the godfather of
neoconservatism”), whose “analyses” are always determined not by political
reality or principle, but rather by calculations of his own political benefit,
depends on the ruler’s favor. And so he must blame the ruler’s mistakes on
anyone but the ruler. Thus, once Kristol was sure that Rumsfeld was down
for the count, he wanted to kick him a few times, so that Bush would think
that he had had a hand in the Secretary’s demise.
Back in March, 2000, my colleague Jim Antle brilliantly skewered the philosophical and political poverty of Kristol’s (and Kristol’s then-Weekly Standard
colleague David Brooks’) strategy for the GOP. Kristol had supported Sen.
McCain’s presidential candidacy against then-Gov. Bush.
Jettison the boorish white Southerners -- a Weekly Standard bete noire
held responsible for much of the GOP's troubles within its pages -- and their
Christian right friends, as well as other elements of the Republican coalition
easily caricatured by the Democrats. Replace them with a party that chablis-sipping
sophisticates from the Northeast who dress like Tucker Carlson would be more
comfortable with. Sprinkle generous amounts of happy talk about reform. Voila! A new majority is born.
Antle
was just kidding about that “new majority” -- he emphasized that the Kristol-Brooks
strategy would relegate the GOP to permanent opposition party status, though
as he quipped, it would receive much more favorable coverage by the New York Times. Indeed, the Times later hired Brooks!
As if Kristol’s attempt to wreck the GOP from within weren’t bad enough,
when McCain’s candidacy was shot down by GOP voters on Super Tuesday in March,
2000, Kristol and others sought to egg him into what the Washington Times’ Wes Pruden called a third-party suicide mission,” which would have guaranteed Al Gore’s electoral victory.
Note the parallel to Kristol’s nemesis Pat Buchanan, who via mischief in
Palm Beach County during the post-election Siege on America, sought to help
Al Gore steal the 2000 election. Completing the parallel, Buchanan too has
sought, of late, to prove his loyalty to George W. Bush.
Considering that even foreigners have long demanded that Rumsfeld be sent packing, Kristol surely didn’t want to be left off the bandwagon. (Justin Raimondo,
who has long pushed the blood libel that Israel was “linked” to 911, and
who is right almost as often as a broken clock, once correctly observed that
“access to power” is all that neoconservatism is about. Gotta give the Devil
his due.)
Let’s be charitable, and fantasize that Kristol believes that by attacking
Rumsfeld, he is directing fire away from the President. But if he believes
that, he isn’t much of a political analyst. (Of course, this is the same
analyst who predicted that the President would win an Electoral College landslide
in last month’s election.) The Secretary has long served Bush’s political
opponents as a proxy for the President. Taking out Rumsfeld would leave the
President exposed to direct fire, would show that Bush is vulnerable to those
most hostile to his administration, and would leave Rumsfeld’s successor
chastened by the awareness of the price of aggressively doing his job.
In any event, Bill Kristol didn’t fool George W. Bush, who after 2000 will never trust him.
Heck, to read the funny papers, you’d think I was the only voice not calling for Rumsfeld’s ouster.
Fade Away, General!
Norman Schwarzkopf’s (Gen., US Army, ret.) role in this affair is the most
disappointing of all. The general, who does not care to fade away, says that
the Secretary “laid it all on the Army, as if he, the secretary of defense,
didn't have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing
it themselves, screwing up.” I don’t see how one could honestly say that
Rumsfeld was rapping the Army. It is no secret, however, that some of Schwarzkopf’s
old cronies from the Army general officers’ corps dislike Rumsfeld. And I
doubt that if Rumsfeld had been Army, instead of a Navy flier, Schwarzkopf
would now be landing on him with both left feet.
But it’s a free country. Besides, opinions are like noses -- everyone’s got
one. Schwarzkopf is just another guy talking through his nose.
The Exchange
At the time, Matt Drudge reported that, far from expressing a G.I.’s honest
sentiment, the question posed by Army Spc. Thomas Wilson at the December
8 assembly was a sucker-punch set up by Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts, who had coached the soldier to ask it, a minor detail that New York Times “reporter” Todd S. Purdum failed to mention. Specialist Wilson now insists
that the question was all his own idea. We can debate whether the question
came from Pitts or Wilson, but it was not Purdum’s place to censor that debate.
(Full disclosure: Todd Purdum is married to one of Bill Clinton’s old press
secretaries, Dee Dee Myers.)
Specialist Thomas Wilson
(278th Regimental Combat Team): Yes, Mr. Secretary. My question is more logistical.
We’ve had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we’ve always staged
here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills
for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our
vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us? [Applause]
Secretary Rumsfeld: I missed the first part of your question. And could you repeat it for me?
Wilson:
Yes, Mr. Secretary. Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up
on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.
Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal
and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted,
picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.
We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.
Rumsfeld:
I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles
are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever
they’re not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I’m told that
they are being -- the Army is -- I think it’s something like 400 a month
are being done. And it’s essentially a matter of physics. It isn’t a matter
of money. It isn’t a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It’s a matter
of production and capability of doing it.
As
you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you
might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began,
the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate
that they believe -- it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously,
but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished
at this moment.
I
can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and
certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle
has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that
they’re working at it at a good clip. It’s interesting, I’ve talked a great
deal about this with a team of people who’ve been working on it hard at the
Pentagon. And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world
on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee
and it can be blown up. And you can go down and, the vehicle, the goal we
have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the
appropriate level of armor available for the troops. And that is what the
Army has been working on.
I
don’t know why Specialist Wilson said that soldiers have been “fighting in
Iraq for coming up on three years,” when the true number is 21 months, i.e.,
less than two years. That’s already long enough, without exaggerating it.
Based on the reaction by the socialist mainstream media (SMSM) to Rumsfeld’s
exchange with Spc. Wilson, I fear I must have missed something. Was Wilson
shell-shocked? Did Rumsfeld slap him across the face a few times?
What Right Flank?
Alleged reporter Todd Purdum’s December 16 New York Times
story was entitled, “Grumbling Swells on Rumsfeld's Right Flank,” suggesting
that conservative Republicans had attacked the Secretary. And yet, no conservatives
were cited in the story. With the exception of Arizona Senator John McCain,
all of the politicians Purdum cited were moderate or liberal Republicans
-- Senators Chuck Hagel and Susan Collins of Nebraska and Maine, respectively.
And while McCain is anti-abortion, the man who is responsible for the “campaign
finance reform” that gutted the First Amendment, while enabling the notorious
“527s” of the just concluded election campaign, and who supports the Kyoto
Accords, which seek in the guise of environmental protection to gut the U.S.
economy, while permitting countries like India and China to pollute with
abandon, could not honestly be referred to as a “conservative.” Indeed, that
McCain has long been the favorite Republican of the SMSM alone is enough
to dispel the notion that he is a conservative. Where were the social and
religious conservatives who truly are on Rumsfeld’s right flank? Purdum did
not cite or even anonymously refer to any.
Another relevant group that the Times failed to mention was paleoconservatives, who are also to Rumsfeld’s right. (The Times’
editors have no compunctions about skewing a story, to keep from mentioning
certain relevant parties; they do it habitually.) From the start of the War
on Terror, paleocons have referred to Rumsfeld as the neocons’ “dupe.” I’m
still waiting for someone to explain how someone can aggressively advocate
for and implement neocon politics, without himself being a neocon. And while
there are many terms one could use to criticize Rumsfeld (arrogant, high-handed,
etc.), “dupe” is the least credible. Oh, but of course -- he’s not a Jew!
That’s why paleos refuse to refer to Rumsfeld as a “neocon.”
Firing Donald Rumsfeld may benefit Pinch Sulzberger, various paleocons, and
the Democrat Party, but it will not help us win the War in Iraq. Not that
the anti-Rumsfeld campaign was designed to help us win the war.
Part II: Where the fault truly lies.
New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.
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