Word: rumsfeld
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Everyone from neocon hacks to flip-flopping Democrats, White House loyalists and "liberal hawk" media pundits have signed on to the notion that it was the right war, botched in the implementation by a tin-eared Defense Secretary promoting a bizarre managerial theory of capital-intensive warfare. Translation: If Rumsfeld had simply sent more troops, the outcome would have been different...
...That, frankly, is a self-serving evasion for anyone who advocated invading Iraq. Blaming Rumsfeld for the debacle it became reminds me of Trotskyists trying to rescue Bolshevism by blaming its grotesque consequences on Stalin's "implementation," rather than on its inner logic...
...Wolfowitz, like Rumsfeld, was also partial to the fantasy that the Iraqis would greet U.S. troops with sweets and flowers and that no occupation mission would really be necessary. Then again, no Administration official could match Dick Cheney for spinning fables on Iraq - from "reconstituted" nukes to U.S. forces being "greeted as liberators," and an insurgency on its last legs - and he's still...
...sectarian rivalries that are fueling the civil war are as much present in the democratic political institutions as they are on the violent streets. It's way too simple to imagine that Iraq turned disastrous because of a few bad tactical choices that can be attributed to Rumsfeld. The morbid symptoms that have plagued post-Saddam Iraq were predicted, long before the invasion, by such veterans of the first President Bush's administration as Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, and also by Marine General Anthony Zinni. They made clear that invading Iraq would be a disastrous strategic choice, and they...
...None of this, of course, absolves Rumsfeld, whose Strangeloveian dissembling on the war has always been among the more bizarre media spectacles offered up by the Administration. America is well rid of him. But it has not yet confronted the roots of its problem in Iraq so long as it avoids the culpability of Cheney, Condi Rice, and President Bush himself - not to mention Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and all those revisionist media pundits who want to blame Rumsfeld for a strategic blunder in which they all had a hand...