Why Rumsfeld Must - and Will - Stay
You'll never see a better, more comprehensive case for why the Rummy-bashers, particularly RINOs like Chuck Hagel and John McCain, should be told (politely) to go to hell than Dafydd ab Hugh's reply to Captain Ed's (slightly) anti-Rumsfeld leanings today:
Point-missing alert: if the Donald were to die or resign for, say, health reasons, Bush would be free to pick someone who was basically a Rumsfeld clone, insensitive enough to push critical reform through, even if it ends the careers of fine people. I don't know if such a person exists right now, but Bush would have a free hand to seek him (or her), and the war -- which depends upon us reforming how we think militarily - would remain winnable.
But if Rumsfeld were forced out via the death of a thousand paper cuts, especially if Republican senators succeeded in ousting him, then his successor would be forced upon Bush by those same rebellious senators: the president would have to name someone who would look to McCain for confirmation every time Bush gave an order. Everything would change.
Forget about reforming the military; that's the main, underlying point of contention here, though nobody on the dump-Rummy side will admit it. They want to go back to what is familiar to them... to massed armies ponderously waddled into place -- a tactic that works well when dealing with a mass invasion of one country by another but is utterly helpless in the situation we're in now and likely will remain in for the forseeable future: fighting a war against stateless terrorists who swarm like angry ants first at one spot then another, who have no territory to conquer, no real command and control structure to disrupt, who consist of a series of disconnected, autonomous cells spread across three quarters of the globe, linked only by shared ideology and the internet.
Yes, in 1990-1991, we sent about half a million men into Kuwait to kick out Hussein. I had to use a range there, two different years, because it took us six months to get them in place in Saudi Arabia prior to the attack, followed by a lengthy aerial bombardment.
You saw what happened in Iraq in 2002-2003 (another range!) when a similar delay was induced by the decision - taken at the demand of several of these same Republican senators - that we try to get the U.N.'s blessing: Hussein shifted the WMD stockpiles to Syria, many of the worst terrorists set up bases there (from which they now move into Iraq, organize attacks, and fade to safety again), and a strategy was hatched whereby Hussein's forces faded into the population then turned to insurgency.
We cannot allow such delays in the future. That is exactly why Rumsfeld was opposed to monkeying around with the U.N. in the first place, according to everything I have seen: he knew what a months-long delay would mean, but he was overruled by the President. Now the very thing that Rumsfeld warned about, that Hussein would have too much time to prepare some sort of defense that we could not predict, has come to pass; and the very senators who forced that situation on us are trying to use it to fire the guy who warned against it! [my emphasis - hell, it's almost verbatim what I posted over at republicanforum.com over two years ago]
Colin Powell desperately wanted us to go to the U.N. Not because Powell is a bad guy but because he is an unimaginative guy: he cannot envision any other way of fighting a war than to mimic the same strategies and tactics that we used in World War II (and Korea, and Vietnam, and so forth) and that Powell studied at the Army War College. He's good at it, but it's all he knows. To a carpenter, every tool looks like a hammer and every problem like a nail.
So if those who, like Powell, cannot envision fighting the kind of war we need to fight today manage to oust Rumsfeld, they will likewise demand he be replaced with one of them, or at least someone who thinks like they think; and they will have considerably more power and support then than they have now, having proven themselves stronger than Bush: they will get what they want.
And we will lose the war. We will flounder exactly as the Russians did in Afghanistan, and for exactly the same reason: rather than fighting a new style of warfare that keeps the enemy staggering around like a blind hound in a meat shop, we'll be sending well-advertised tank columns through the Khyber Pass to be blown up by the mujahadin.
The McCainiacs, of course, will blame Bush; McCain or his clone will be the next president, and the collapse will accelerate. They will prove to the American people that the Republicans are even worse at dealing with defense and security issues than the Democrats, and we'll have another period of four or five straight presidential victories for Democrats, as we did in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. (And the Democrats probably would have won in 1952, if Eisenhower hadn't run.) This will coincide with a collapse of American power and a retreat into Fortress America, to be hit again and again by terrorists because we're not forward-deploying against them.
That would be a catastrophe, Ed... and nearly all of it would be traceable to Bush having knuckled under to the demands of a bunch of thugs, several of them Republican: that Rumsfeld be ousted because they're more afraid of real reform than they are of an American collapse.
Well, okay, that penulatimate paragraph is a bit of a stretch. Besides, Hillary Clinton is going to be the next POTUS in any case, and by the time she ascends people are going to be calling her the return of Attila the Hen - until about twenty-nine seconds into her Inaugural Address. But the central point of getting one shot at commonsensical foreign and defense policy in the current conflict is air-tight. The very notion of common sense in foreign and defense policy is, indeed, as radical as it is critical; the slightest retreat from it will disintegrate into an inevitable, and irretrievable, rout that the nation's survival as we know it cannot withstand.
Regardless, you KNOW something else is at work when Rumsfeld's (which is to say, Bush's) enemies descend so deep into pettiness as to snipe at him for not having personally signed condolence letters. Given that the whole "unarmored Humvee" flap was yet another Big Media hoax, which is why this new angle was resorted to in the first place, it would seem to be yet another fizzled and feeble gambit.
Still, you expect this sort of rot from the donks; that's just what they do. Not for the first time, however, do I find myself wondering what it will take to make Republicans in D.C. realize that they're in the majority and that that means they get to run the country. For six years the majority played Washington Generals to Bill Clinton's Harlem Globetrotters, and for the past four it sat there and let the other side, its head now replaced by an even bigger mouth, revel and wallow in libel and slander and sedition virtually unopposed. And now, at the GOP's moment of greatest triumph, when a generation or more of national hegemony beckons, the usual gang of idiot "moderates" arises to prop up the DisLoyal Opposition yet again.
Funny, isn't it, how the man who is supposedly the dumbest homo sapiens in the Beltway - the re-elected President of the United States - seems like the only elected pachyderm who "gets it."
Also immensely reassuring, since that's the trumping reason why Rummy is going to remain precisely where he is - "embattled," one suspects, to his detractors' bitter end.
UPDATE: Jon Podhoretz lays out the details here.
Point-missing alert: if the Donald were to die or resign for, say, health reasons, Bush would be free to pick someone who was basically a Rumsfeld clone, insensitive enough to push critical reform through, even if it ends the careers of fine people. I don't know if such a person exists right now, but Bush would have a free hand to seek him (or her), and the war -- which depends upon us reforming how we think militarily - would remain winnable.
But if Rumsfeld were forced out via the death of a thousand paper cuts, especially if Republican senators succeeded in ousting him, then his successor would be forced upon Bush by those same rebellious senators: the president would have to name someone who would look to McCain for confirmation every time Bush gave an order. Everything would change.
Forget about reforming the military; that's the main, underlying point of contention here, though nobody on the dump-Rummy side will admit it. They want to go back to what is familiar to them... to massed armies ponderously waddled into place -- a tactic that works well when dealing with a mass invasion of one country by another but is utterly helpless in the situation we're in now and likely will remain in for the forseeable future: fighting a war against stateless terrorists who swarm like angry ants first at one spot then another, who have no territory to conquer, no real command and control structure to disrupt, who consist of a series of disconnected, autonomous cells spread across three quarters of the globe, linked only by shared ideology and the internet.
Yes, in 1990-1991, we sent about half a million men into Kuwait to kick out Hussein. I had to use a range there, two different years, because it took us six months to get them in place in Saudi Arabia prior to the attack, followed by a lengthy aerial bombardment.
You saw what happened in Iraq in 2002-2003 (another range!) when a similar delay was induced by the decision - taken at the demand of several of these same Republican senators - that we try to get the U.N.'s blessing: Hussein shifted the WMD stockpiles to Syria, many of the worst terrorists set up bases there (from which they now move into Iraq, organize attacks, and fade to safety again), and a strategy was hatched whereby Hussein's forces faded into the population then turned to insurgency.
We cannot allow such delays in the future. That is exactly why Rumsfeld was opposed to monkeying around with the U.N. in the first place, according to everything I have seen: he knew what a months-long delay would mean, but he was overruled by the President. Now the very thing that Rumsfeld warned about, that Hussein would have too much time to prepare some sort of defense that we could not predict, has come to pass; and the very senators who forced that situation on us are trying to use it to fire the guy who warned against it! [my emphasis - hell, it's almost verbatim what I posted over at republicanforum.com over two years ago]
Colin Powell desperately wanted us to go to the U.N. Not because Powell is a bad guy but because he is an unimaginative guy: he cannot envision any other way of fighting a war than to mimic the same strategies and tactics that we used in World War II (and Korea, and Vietnam, and so forth) and that Powell studied at the Army War College. He's good at it, but it's all he knows. To a carpenter, every tool looks like a hammer and every problem like a nail.
So if those who, like Powell, cannot envision fighting the kind of war we need to fight today manage to oust Rumsfeld, they will likewise demand he be replaced with one of them, or at least someone who thinks like they think; and they will have considerably more power and support then than they have now, having proven themselves stronger than Bush: they will get what they want.
And we will lose the war. We will flounder exactly as the Russians did in Afghanistan, and for exactly the same reason: rather than fighting a new style of warfare that keeps the enemy staggering around like a blind hound in a meat shop, we'll be sending well-advertised tank columns through the Khyber Pass to be blown up by the mujahadin.
The McCainiacs, of course, will blame Bush; McCain or his clone will be the next president, and the collapse will accelerate. They will prove to the American people that the Republicans are even worse at dealing with defense and security issues than the Democrats, and we'll have another period of four or five straight presidential victories for Democrats, as we did in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. (And the Democrats probably would have won in 1952, if Eisenhower hadn't run.) This will coincide with a collapse of American power and a retreat into Fortress America, to be hit again and again by terrorists because we're not forward-deploying against them.
That would be a catastrophe, Ed... and nearly all of it would be traceable to Bush having knuckled under to the demands of a bunch of thugs, several of them Republican: that Rumsfeld be ousted because they're more afraid of real reform than they are of an American collapse.
Well, okay, that penulatimate paragraph is a bit of a stretch. Besides, Hillary Clinton is going to be the next POTUS in any case, and by the time she ascends people are going to be calling her the return of Attila the Hen - until about twenty-nine seconds into her Inaugural Address. But the central point of getting one shot at commonsensical foreign and defense policy in the current conflict is air-tight. The very notion of common sense in foreign and defense policy is, indeed, as radical as it is critical; the slightest retreat from it will disintegrate into an inevitable, and irretrievable, rout that the nation's survival as we know it cannot withstand.
Regardless, you KNOW something else is at work when Rumsfeld's (which is to say, Bush's) enemies descend so deep into pettiness as to snipe at him for not having personally signed condolence letters. Given that the whole "unarmored Humvee" flap was yet another Big Media hoax, which is why this new angle was resorted to in the first place, it would seem to be yet another fizzled and feeble gambit.
Still, you expect this sort of rot from the donks; that's just what they do. Not for the first time, however, do I find myself wondering what it will take to make Republicans in D.C. realize that they're in the majority and that that means they get to run the country. For six years the majority played Washington Generals to Bill Clinton's Harlem Globetrotters, and for the past four it sat there and let the other side, its head now replaced by an even bigger mouth, revel and wallow in libel and slander and sedition virtually unopposed. And now, at the GOP's moment of greatest triumph, when a generation or more of national hegemony beckons, the usual gang of idiot "moderates" arises to prop up the DisLoyal Opposition yet again.
Funny, isn't it, how the man who is supposedly the dumbest homo sapiens in the Beltway - the re-elected President of the United States - seems like the only elected pachyderm who "gets it."
Also immensely reassuring, since that's the trumping reason why Rummy is going to remain precisely where he is - "embattled," one suspects, to his detractors' bitter end.
UPDATE: Jon Podhoretz lays out the details here.
posted by JASmius at 6:15 PM
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