Word: rumsfeldism
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...Sure, it would have been nice if Bush had said, "Yes, we erred. Perhaps we should not have disbanded the Iraqi army." Would saying that have won him praise for his candor? Not in the poisoned climate of Washington today. Last July, Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, returned from Iraq with a balanced and honest assessment of what the allies had done right and wrong in the immediate postwar period. What was the next morning's Washington Post headline? WOLFOWITZ GIVES NUANCED ASSESSMENT OF IRAQ SITUATION? No. WOLFOWITZ CONCEDES IRAQ ERRORS, followed by a brief for the Administration's critics...
...Americans, that question--whether the war was right or wrong--is now secondary to another one: How do we get out of it? The Marines' relentless fighting in Fallujah, Washington hoped, would send a clear message to the insurgents: there would be no retreat. It was, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, a "test of wills." General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) responsible for Iraq, told Bush in a video-conference call last Friday that his troops were not seeing Sunni-Shi'ite cooperation in any structural or systematic way. In the south, U.S. forces reclaimed the city...
From the beginning of operation Iraqi Freedom, critics have questioned Rumsfeld's insistence that a relatively lean force was sufficient to take care of business in Iraq--for both the initial assault and all that has come in its wake. That Rumsfeld's go-small strategy has failed to make Iraq a secure place is now clear to almost everyone. Iraq's borders are still dangerously porous. Fallujah and other parts of the Sunni triangle, unmolested during the invasion last year--in part because the U.S. failed to get Turkey's approval to move forces across its border--remain untamed...
...last week Rumsfeld acknowledged for the first time that he might be forced to break his pledge not to keep any U.S. soldiers in Iraq for more than 12 months. With the coalition desperate to quash the Shi'ite insurgency before it spreads, the Pentagon says it will probably delay shipping out some 25,000 soldiers--mostly members of the 1st Armored Division--who have been in the country for a year. Because of scheduled troop rotations, there are 135,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, up from 120,000 several weeks ago. An Army officer at Centcom insists that delaying...
...they struggled to explain the unnerving drop-off in Shi'ite support for the occupation, some U.S. officials suggested a familiar foe might be helping to stoke the uprising. "We know the Iranians have been meddling," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters last week. "And it's unhelpful to have neighboring countries meddling in the affairs of Iraq...