1 December 2004

Don Rumsfeld Needs To Find Another Job

Directing the Defense Intelligence Agency to cherry-pick intelligence to support attacking Iraq was disingenuous and put America on the road to a disastrous and unnecessary war. Asking the White House legal team for an opinion to justify the torture of detainees was immoral and opened the door for war crimes. Bungling the post-war planning has cost American and Iraqi lives and put the country on the brink of civil war. Any single one of these acts should have been enough for Dubya to give Rummy the bum’s rush he deserves. But Rumsfeld is staying on, and now he's adding insult to injury.

The recent news about Rummy hasn't been that good, especially for our troops that are now in or soon-to-be-in Iraq. Dubya has given Donny another 4 years to shred American military policy, credibility, and prestige. But the worst news is that the needs of our troops are on the back burner.

The December 8th Q&A Rumsfeld had with GIs in Iraq is just another incident in a series of evil- and stupid-doing. When a soldier stood up and defiantly asked when his outfit would be equipped with proper armor for their vehicles, Donny had the nerve to comment that when the nation goes to war, it goes with army it has, not the army it wants or wishes. Translation: you misfit back-door draftees and your insufficient, obsolete equipment will just have to make do.

Besides, Rumsfeld mused, when you think about it, you can put all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can still get blown up.

That's actually a true statement. You could nuke it. You could drop the MOAB on it. Or you could use a few dozen pounds of high explosives from the 300 tons that got looted by insurgents from al QaQaa because the Secretary of Defense wouldn't commit enough troops to secure weapons dumps after the invasion. Ho hum. Whatever.

Rumsfeld's "if wishes were fishes" non-answer to a perfectly legitimate question concerning his own incompetence ought to help our troops to understand exactly where their safety ranks on Rumsfeld's priority list. It ranks Not Very High. Now that's a pretty serious charge, right? If you’ve noticed the millions of uber-patriots driving around with "Support Our Troops" refrigerator magnets schlumped onto the rear ends of their SUVs, you'd think that anyone whose policies compromised the safety of our troops might could be in a heap o' trouble. But with folks who drive quasi-military vehicles on their daily job commutes, the support they profess for the troops decays about as quickly as the magnetic fields from their kitschy little Patriot Props. The sporty little yellow ribbons are a badge of belonging more than anything else. It’s similar to honking your horn and flipping off the peaceniks demonstrating at the stoplight.

Let's take a moment to tic off the ways Rummy "supports our troops":

• He intentionally obscured evidence that would have shown that attacking Iraq was unnecessary and we now have almost 1300 dead, thousands wounded, and tens of thousands in harm’s way.
• The bogus "intelligence" he presented as proof of Saddam's WMDs helped to convince most of our allies to not participate in the "coalition of the willing" so our people have to provide 90% of the troops.
• He rushed into battle with insufficient troop strength and equipment.
• He knew about the torture and murder of detainees and did nothing to stop it; in fact he sought legal justification for it for a CYA and now our enemies have a model to reference when treating American POWs.
• He failed to secure thousands of tons of explosives which are now being used against our own troops.
• He has allowed the creation of a class system in the military where the regular army treats the Guard troopers as their inferiors.
• He has negligently failed to properly equip our troops months after the equipment deficiencies were made known.

And now his answer to all of this is... a platitude-laden spew of garbage about nothing.

The Republicans have for years claimed to be the Party of Accountability and Personal Responsibility. People have to take responsibility for their own actions, they say. Why, if you're on welfare you have to get off your butt and get busy. Don’t bother us for a handout and sell off your Welfare Cadillac if you’re really that hard up. Idle hands do the Devil’s work. Three Strikes and You're Out. Do the Crime and Do the Time.

Where is Rummy's accountability? If you or I made any mistakes or committed devious acts of that magnitude on the job we'd be fired faster than you can say "Where’s the WMDs?" But that’s real life. This is politics… meaning that with Dubya at the helm, when America goes to war, we go with the Secretary of Defense we have, not the one we want or wish.