Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pilloried by Hillary last week at an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rumsfeld managed to muster a lot of 100 year old sanitized oaths like "Heavens to Betsy," and "Goodness Gracious" to explain why the US was having "a dickens of a time" making any headway in Iraq. Hillary attacked him with a left jab ( “Yes, we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy.”) and then followed with a right hook (“Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”). Rumsfeld was reduced to muttering "My Goodness," sort of a strange response, don't you think, for the man who is presiding over the world's most powerful military machine?
Afterwords, Hillary called for Rummy's resignation, but he won't resign and Bush won't fire him. Why? Because Bush's only foreign policy is the one given to him by Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and other members of Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Bush's only job as Salesman-in-Chief is to sell it, not to come up with a new policy. It's better to have a failed policy in Iraq than none at all, they must be thinking. Besides all these men have their collective egos invested in succeeding in Iraq. Any admission that they might have to change their policy is tantamount to admitting failure. So they would rather cling to the same policy and ride out their terms handing the mess over to the next administration. Who's going to stop them? Not Congress unless the Democrats take over control of the House and Senate in the November elections. This way they can go out shouting "Stay the Course" and blaming the next administration for failing in Iraq, failing in the economy (which they've trashed in the long term) and failing at the War on Terrorism, the fires of which they've done everything to fan.
The self-interrogating Rumsfeld has a strange way of answering questions. If he were to be asked whether the world would be better off if he resigned, he might answer this way: "If I stepped down, would the American people be better off? Possibly. Would the Iraqis be better off? I don't think so. Would I get to spend more time with my family? You bet. Would my family be better off? For sure. Heavens to Murgetroid, I would like nothing better than to turn over this dickens of a job to someone else. Henny Penny, Loosey Goosey, but is the Sky Falling? I don't think so. Will the war in Iraq be over some day? Yes. Will it be during this administration? Maybe. Are we better off today than we were yesterday? I think so." And so on and so on. By asking himself a series of questions and then providing answers, he has successfully avoided answering the original question. A very good technique I think for avoiding embarrassing questions.
But beside that Rumsfeld likes to give his audiences elementary lessons in algebra that might go something like this in response to the question, "Mr. Rumsfeld, why are our troops so inadequately prepared for the war in Iraq?" "Well, let's say that our preparedness at the beginning of the war is represented by x. Then as the war goes on, we decide we want to be prepared at a level of 5x. But during the interim we've increased our preparedness to 3x. Then we are 2x short of where we want to be, but 3x more prepared than where we started out at 1x." Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! As every ninth grade student of algebra knows, you never refer to x as 1x. This is an algebraic faux pas! Goodness gracious, should Auntie Rummy go back and retake Algebra I? I think so. Does he know what he's talking about? No. Is he full of BS? You bet!
Then there's Rummy's philosophical analysis of known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Like at the outset of the war when they asked him how long we were going to be in Iraq, and Rummy replied something like this: "It's an unknown unknown, but I think 6 days, maybe 6 weeks, I don't think 6 months." Well, Rummy, how about 6 years? It's one of those unknown unknowns with a large margin of error, I guess. Maybe Rummy should have trotted out the Bell curve. I think he's angling for a professorship of philosophy at Harvard where he can expound on known knowns like how many troops we have at our disposal, unknown knowns like where Osama is (he's got to be some place), known unknowns like how many Iraqi civilians have been killed so far and unknown unknowns like how many young Arabs are going to grow up hating the US.
Talk about a failed policy! The Bush Administration adopted the neocon agenda of invading Iraq for the oil and to make it a jumping off point for exerting US geopolitical power in the Middle East. What they created instead was an empowered and emboldened Iran whose main counter (Saddam) has been eliminated and a Shiite theocracy aligned with Iran (who are also Shiites). In fact now instead of geopolitical stability (what we had before the US invasion) we have a Shiite crescent throughout the Middle East presided over by Iranian President, Ahmadindahead. Does anyone think the world is better off now that Saddam is gone? I don't hear them asking that question any more. As the amount of death and destruction caused by the US invasion approaches that caused by Saddam, what excuse will they come up with next? Instead of spreading democracy, they've spread theocracy. Instead of the people of Iraq loving us, they demonstrate in the streets against us. Instead of geopolitical stability, we've created a greater Iran.
So Hillary has countered Carl Rove's strategy to paint the Democrats as those who would "cut and run" in Iraq. Instead Hillary and the Dems will make this a referendum on the Reps' "failed policy and incompetence" in Iraq, and "Why should we believe their assurances now?" Good move, Hillary. You have reduced it to a battle of the sound bites. Now it just remains to be seen how much money each party can drum up in order to bombard us with TV ads whose themes will be "cut and run" or "failed policy and incompetence."
