Cowering Democrats- CAN'T raise heck about Incompetent Don Rumsfeld, his TORTURE, and his KANGAROO COURTS..???
As the op-eds start pilling up here at CowardlyDemocrats, we realize that we still haven't gotten to several blockbuster issues which the Cowering Dems FAIL to make an issue about.
In the case of these two issues, the COWERING of the Democrat "leaders" LEAVES OUR TROOPS VULNERABLE, twisting in the winds as hostages to political fortune.... US servicemen and women left TWISTING IN THE WIND to rot, because the Democratic "leadership" would rather COWER under bush-rove-cheney-rumsfeld's propaganda BS, than STAND UP and FIGHT BACK against the bush-rove propaganda machine.
The most glaring case is Don "Dr. Strangelove" Rumsfeld. The Washington Press Whores Corpse think Mr. Rumsfeld is cute and entertaining when he starts babbling like the Mad Hatter, "There are things we know, there are things we don't know, and there are things we know that what don't know" (or however he said it, that constituted "news" in the DC press corpse's pathetic "news cycle.")
But the fact is that Mr. Rumsfeld is grossly incompetent at EVER SINGLE ASPECT of managing the Department of Defense. On 9-11 he was shuffling papers in his Pentagon office, as FOUR hijacked airliners roamed American skies, AND OUR SECRETARY OF WAR WAS CLUELESS, IGNORANT, AND UNINFORMED.
The "shuffling papers at his desk" image is not a metaphor - Secretary Rumsfeld was literally at his desk, shuffling papers, as the FOURTH and final hijacked airliner slammed into the very building that Mr. Rumsfeld had his office in, the Pentagon. And that fourth hijacked airliner slammed into the Pentagon ALMOST AN HOUR after the first hijacked flying bomb slammed into the first World Trade Center tower. Where was the US Air Force, where were the fighters which were supposed to be ON ALERT, as not one, not two, not three but FOUR hijacked airliners roamed American skies??
Answer: We don't know, because Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and the Cowering Democrats WHITEWASHED the 9-11 Commission. But we do know that on the eve of the 9-11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld's PREOCCUPATION was-the multibillion dollar missile defense system dubbed "Star Wars" by critics. Another example of Mr. Rumsfeld's cluselessness (besides AWOL alert fighters, and hijackers roaming America's skies unmolested) is that the "threat" that Mr. Rumsfeld was so concerned about in his "pre-9-11 mindset" was the growing military power of Communist China. Now that the US military is preoccupied with Iraq and the Middle East, the business side of the Bush administration is devoted to transferring as much wealth, jobs, and business to that same Communist China as possible, as the "Made in China" merchandise filling Walmart shelves demonstrates.
Which brings us to IRAQ.
Could ANYONE screw up the US occupation of Iraq more dramatically than the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush crew?
Anyone with AN OUNCE of awareness of that region knows that Afghanistan was mired in a brutal, ferocious civil war for an entire DECADE after the Russians (Red Army) left the nation they had invaded. That makes almost TWO decades of war and civil war, minefields, poisoned wells, hostages, torture, revenge killings, and massacres. Before Mr. Rumsfeld arrived at the DoD, the Republicans were at the forefront of claiming the Mujahadeen resistance to the Red Army which drove the Russians out of Afghanistan was a glorious victory that proved that Ronald Reagan "Won the Cold War" against the "evil empire." Yet once the Cold War was over, Rumsfeld and Cheney were at the forefront of the "slash defense spending as part of the 'Peace Dividend' - with NO "soft letdown" for town and regions that had been entirely dependent on DEFENSE SPENDING for entire decades- regions like the California aerospace-defense industry, the northeast high-tech defense region, and of course airbases, Army posts, and Navy ports that were shut down "cold turkey." Those spending cutbacks, along with the trillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts of the looted Savings and Loans industry, led to the Bush recession of 1991, and the virulent right-wing "Hate Government" rhetoric that Republicans effectively used in 1994 to win the majority in the US House of Representatives. Right-Wing talk radio played relentlessly to disaffected, resentful listeners, with the blessing of the "it's government's fault!" Republican Party, and right-wing terrorist Timmy McVeigh took those "hate government" screeds to heart, when he planned and executed his murderous bombings of the Murrah government building in Oklahoma City.
But we digress, with this little discussion of cold-hearted defense slashings, base closures, the looted S&L bailouts, and Bush1 recession, and the OKC terrorist bombing, from Rumsfeld's current incompetence running the Iraq war.
In Afghanistan the Civil War had been ongoing for years, with massacres, rapes, revenge killings, collateral damage, reprisals, and more massacres the order of the war. The Pushtun clan, the majority clan of both Pakistan and Afghanistan, was supplied by the Saudis and Pakistan ISI secret intel-police, and led by the most ferocious, militarized militia, the Taliban. The Taliban, in turn, was supported by the Arab fighters acting as enforcers and, when need be, shock troops, the Al Qiada fighters under Ossama bin Laden.
Given that mix of terror, torture, reprisal, and massacre, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney thought that turning the US military into TORTURE-BOYS in Iraq... was going to terrify any potential insurgents????
The OBVIOUS result of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush TORTURE gulag is that it would UNITE ALL the warring Muslim factions- Pushtun and Tajik, Uzbek and Afghan, Shiite and Sunni - is hatred and spite for Americans. And how do you even factor in the HUMILIATION and DEGRADATION photos, naked Iraqi prisoners piled in mounds, forced to act out sexual acts on each other, smeared in feces, etc?
Hell, it is DISGUSTING just to write about Herr Rumsfeld's TORTURE and SADISM gulag, but all these two or three years after the Abu Ghraib torture and sadism scandal first broke, the COWERING DEMOCRATS STILL can't find their voice to criticize and DEMAND the resignation of the INCOMPETENT, ABUSIVE, and ghoulish SOB who is in charge of the US war machine?
Well, the above discussion of Mr. Rumfeld's follies, and the Democrat's cowering re demanding his resignation, is as much as we can stomach this morning. And we haven't even discussed Mr. Rumsfeld's KANGAROO COURTS for female privates, following orders, caught up in his grotesque debasement of the US flag and uniform.
We will leave it to this Buzzflash editorial to enumerate Mr. Rumsfeld's other policy FAILURES, bordering on tragedy, bordering on grotesque FARCE. American servicemen and women are not only being held HOSTAGE to Mr. Rumsfeld's FOLLY, they are also held hostage to the CLUELESS, COWERING, "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" Democrats.
Next time- how the Democrats LEAVE THE VETERANS TWISTING IN THE WIND, by REFUSING to make the MURRAY AMENDMENT (to fund $2.7 billion dollars for Veteran's care and rehab, shot down on a party-line vote by the lying Repuglicans) into a sound-bite, prime-time newscast issue. The Cowering Democrats seem to think that merely voting in the Senate for an issue, only to be steamrolled by the bush-rove-cheney Republican corruption machine, constitutes the full measure of "leadership."
___________________________________________
Don Rumsfeld, America's Biggest Flop Ever
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Mike Whitney
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/03/con06112.html
Donald Rumsfeld will feature prominently in the chronicle of military history. His name can be affixed to every major strategic catastrophe since the inception of the Iraq war 3 years ago. Rumsfeld now ranks among the greatest bunglers of all time. His litany of failures reads like a journeyman’s manual for military defeat, rather than a blueprint for peaceful occupation. His performance as Sec-Def makes George Armstrong Custer look like Erwin Rommel.
Under Rumsfeld’s leadership the “cakewalk” war has morphed into an “unwinnable” quagmire; sucking men and resources into its vortex at an unimaginable rate. The occupation of Iraq “should have been simple” says political analyst Noam Chomsky, but under Rumsfeld’s stewardship, it has become more difficult than the Nazi occupation of France.
Only in Bush-world would such manifest incompetence be lauded as achievement.
“You’re doin’ a heck-of-a job, Rummy.”
The decision to invade Iraq with a paltry force of 150,000 men was all Rumsfeld’s. His narrow views of a smaller, more agile military blinded him to the requirements of a massive occupation. When challenged on the topic by military professionals, like General Shinseki, Rumsfeld brusquely dispatched the decorated veteran to an early retirement.
Rumsfeld’s shortsightedness had a dramatic affect on the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground. As the looting of museums and government buildings persisted for weeks, destroying any hope to quickly establish order, Rumsfeld breezily brushed off criticism of the lawlessness saying, “Stuff happens.”
Those first weeks exposed the callous disregard for the safety and security of the Iraqi people and become the rallying cry for the nascent resistance that would later sweep through the Sunni heartland.
The lack of troop-strength made it impossible for the military to safeguard the mammoth armories and ammunition-dumps left behind by Saddam. Members of the fledgling resistance were free to remove truckloads of weaponry and bomb-making material that would later be used to kill American soldiers. The number of American casualties would be considerably lower had Rumsfeld paid attention to his generals and increased the size of the occupation army.
We know from Paul Bremer’s recent comments that Rumsfeld never anticipated the massive resistance to the American presence. He ignored the State Dept’s plans for occupation assuming that American troops would be greeted as liberators. Even when clear signs appeared of a full-throated rebellion, Rumsfeld dismissed the violence as the work of “Saddam loyalists and dead-enders.”
There was no strategy for keeping civil society running. In fact, Iraq became a laboratory for applying a neoliberal-model that was completely foreign to the native people. The results were catastrophic. Unemployment soared, subsidies were stripped away, prices skyrocketed, unions were banned, and Iraqi society went into a state of shock.
More disastrous, was Rumsfeld’s plan for de-Ba’athification. Normally, imperial powers leave as much of the existing government as possible to allow for the smooth transition from one ruling party to the next. Rather than finding common ground with members of the former regime, Rumsfeld chose to destroy every trace of Ba’ath rule forcing a restructuring of the entire political establishment from the ground up. This was an unbelievably stupid move that upset the continuity between governments.
It was equally foolish to disband the Iraqi military; sending home 450,000 fully-armed soldiers without pay or job prospects. It should have been easy to anticipate that many of these disgruntled recruits would wind up fighting against the occupation.
And, why didn’t Rumsfeld bring in military police to deal with the protests, civil disputes, routine patrols and peacekeeping duties? Instead, those tasks were assigned to trigger-happy army regulars who over-reacted in tense situations oftentimes killing innocent civilians and alienating the public. Soldiers are clearly not trained to handle these duties.
It was Rumsfeld who ordered the leveling of Falluja; a gratuitous act of homicidal vengeance which galvanized the resistance and generated a firestorm of reprisals across the Sunni triangle. For Iraqis, Falluja represents the turning point in the American occupation. Even cautious Iraqis must have seen that their predicament no longer provided any viable political options.
The details of Rumsfeld’s charnel house at Abu Ghraib provided even more fuel for the resistance. The Defense Secretary chose to jettison America’s threadbare moral authority simply to extort information from farmers and city people. Imagine the boost in recruitment for the resistance after photos of the perverted treatment of detainees appeared in the media?
Rumsfeld lashed out at the media for displaying the pictures of abused Iraqis to the public and discounted claims that the torture was authorized at the highest levels of the defense establishment. It’s clear now that the paper trail for the abuse leads straight to Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld dismissed the charges as the work, “of a few bad apples.”
Abu Ghraib eliminated any prospect for mutual trust between the warring parties. Now, there’s no hope that the conflict will be resolved through political negotiation.
The current wave of sectarian violence is also Rumsfeld’s doing. It is a re-creation of the terror-campaign that swept through El Salvador during the 1980s. The Interior Ministry has adopted the “Salvador Option” -- a reference to the death squads that plagued that country throughout the Reagan era.
The up-tick in violence suggests that the military no longer sees peace and security as achievable so, instead, is pursuing a policy of widespread anarchy disguised as sectarian violence. The end-game is the balkanization of the country into small, manageable statelets that are easier to exploit for their resources.
The present situation in Iraq can only be described as nightmarish; and endless cycle of bombings, brutality and butchery all concealed behind a screen of media-generated disinformation.
Rumsfeld accepts no responsibility for Iraq’s downward-spiral or the incalculable suffering he has engendered. Instead, he points the finger at the least likely candidate for blame; the media.
“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but our country has not,” Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations. “The violent extremists have established ‘media relations committees’—and have proven to be highly successful at manipulating opinion-elites. They plan to design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communications to intimidate and break the collective will of free people.”
The bungled occupation of Iraq has nothing to do “violent extremists” who’ve “successfully manipulated opinion-elites.” In fact, it has nothing to do with media at all. For the most part, the fault lies with one man, Donald Rumsfeld, a buck-passing narcissist who sees the world through the jaundiced lens of his own blinkered vanity.
Major General Paul Eaton summarized Rumsfeld’s performance better than anyone else:
“Rumsfeld has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld is a self-deluded megalomaniac who has heaped disgrace on himself and his country. It will take more than his customary glib repartee or slick excuse-making to distance himself from his ultimate legacy as America’s biggest flop.
In the case of these two issues, the COWERING of the Democrat "leaders" LEAVES OUR TROOPS VULNERABLE, twisting in the winds as hostages to political fortune.... US servicemen and women left TWISTING IN THE WIND to rot, because the Democratic "leadership" would rather COWER under bush-rove-cheney-rumsfeld's propaganda BS, than STAND UP and FIGHT BACK against the bush-rove propaganda machine.
The most glaring case is Don "Dr. Strangelove" Rumsfeld. The Washington Press Whores Corpse think Mr. Rumsfeld is cute and entertaining when he starts babbling like the Mad Hatter, "There are things we know, there are things we don't know, and there are things we know that what don't know" (or however he said it, that constituted "news" in the DC press corpse's pathetic "news cycle.")
But the fact is that Mr. Rumsfeld is grossly incompetent at EVER SINGLE ASPECT of managing the Department of Defense. On 9-11 he was shuffling papers in his Pentagon office, as FOUR hijacked airliners roamed American skies, AND OUR SECRETARY OF WAR WAS CLUELESS, IGNORANT, AND UNINFORMED.
The "shuffling papers at his desk" image is not a metaphor - Secretary Rumsfeld was literally at his desk, shuffling papers, as the FOURTH and final hijacked airliner slammed into the very building that Mr. Rumsfeld had his office in, the Pentagon. And that fourth hijacked airliner slammed into the Pentagon ALMOST AN HOUR after the first hijacked flying bomb slammed into the first World Trade Center tower. Where was the US Air Force, where were the fighters which were supposed to be ON ALERT, as not one, not two, not three but FOUR hijacked airliners roamed American skies??
Answer: We don't know, because Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and the Cowering Democrats WHITEWASHED the 9-11 Commission. But we do know that on the eve of the 9-11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld's PREOCCUPATION was-the multibillion dollar missile defense system dubbed "Star Wars" by critics. Another example of Mr. Rumsfeld's cluselessness (besides AWOL alert fighters, and hijackers roaming America's skies unmolested) is that the "threat" that Mr. Rumsfeld was so concerned about in his "pre-9-11 mindset" was the growing military power of Communist China. Now that the US military is preoccupied with Iraq and the Middle East, the business side of the Bush administration is devoted to transferring as much wealth, jobs, and business to that same Communist China as possible, as the "Made in China" merchandise filling Walmart shelves demonstrates.
Which brings us to IRAQ.
Could ANYONE screw up the US occupation of Iraq more dramatically than the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush crew?
Anyone with AN OUNCE of awareness of that region knows that Afghanistan was mired in a brutal, ferocious civil war for an entire DECADE after the Russians (Red Army) left the nation they had invaded. That makes almost TWO decades of war and civil war, minefields, poisoned wells, hostages, torture, revenge killings, and massacres. Before Mr. Rumsfeld arrived at the DoD, the Republicans were at the forefront of claiming the Mujahadeen resistance to the Red Army which drove the Russians out of Afghanistan was a glorious victory that proved that Ronald Reagan "Won the Cold War" against the "evil empire." Yet once the Cold War was over, Rumsfeld and Cheney were at the forefront of the "slash defense spending as part of the 'Peace Dividend' - with NO "soft letdown" for town and regions that had been entirely dependent on DEFENSE SPENDING for entire decades- regions like the California aerospace-defense industry, the northeast high-tech defense region, and of course airbases, Army posts, and Navy ports that were shut down "cold turkey." Those spending cutbacks, along with the trillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts of the looted Savings and Loans industry, led to the Bush recession of 1991, and the virulent right-wing "Hate Government" rhetoric that Republicans effectively used in 1994 to win the majority in the US House of Representatives. Right-Wing talk radio played relentlessly to disaffected, resentful listeners, with the blessing of the "it's government's fault!" Republican Party, and right-wing terrorist Timmy McVeigh took those "hate government" screeds to heart, when he planned and executed his murderous bombings of the Murrah government building in Oklahoma City.
But we digress, with this little discussion of cold-hearted defense slashings, base closures, the looted S&L bailouts, and Bush1 recession, and the OKC terrorist bombing, from Rumsfeld's current incompetence running the Iraq war.
In Afghanistan the Civil War had been ongoing for years, with massacres, rapes, revenge killings, collateral damage, reprisals, and more massacres the order of the war. The Pushtun clan, the majority clan of both Pakistan and Afghanistan, was supplied by the Saudis and Pakistan ISI secret intel-police, and led by the most ferocious, militarized militia, the Taliban. The Taliban, in turn, was supported by the Arab fighters acting as enforcers and, when need be, shock troops, the Al Qiada fighters under Ossama bin Laden.
Given that mix of terror, torture, reprisal, and massacre, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney thought that turning the US military into TORTURE-BOYS in Iraq... was going to terrify any potential insurgents????
The OBVIOUS result of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush TORTURE gulag is that it would UNITE ALL the warring Muslim factions- Pushtun and Tajik, Uzbek and Afghan, Shiite and Sunni - is hatred and spite for Americans. And how do you even factor in the HUMILIATION and DEGRADATION photos, naked Iraqi prisoners piled in mounds, forced to act out sexual acts on each other, smeared in feces, etc?
Hell, it is DISGUSTING just to write about Herr Rumsfeld's TORTURE and SADISM gulag, but all these two or three years after the Abu Ghraib torture and sadism scandal first broke, the COWERING DEMOCRATS STILL can't find their voice to criticize and DEMAND the resignation of the INCOMPETENT, ABUSIVE, and ghoulish SOB who is in charge of the US war machine?
Well, the above discussion of Mr. Rumfeld's follies, and the Democrat's cowering re demanding his resignation, is as much as we can stomach this morning. And we haven't even discussed Mr. Rumsfeld's KANGAROO COURTS for female privates, following orders, caught up in his grotesque debasement of the US flag and uniform.
We will leave it to this Buzzflash editorial to enumerate Mr. Rumsfeld's other policy FAILURES, bordering on tragedy, bordering on grotesque FARCE. American servicemen and women are not only being held HOSTAGE to Mr. Rumsfeld's FOLLY, they are also held hostage to the CLUELESS, COWERING, "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" Democrats.
Next time- how the Democrats LEAVE THE VETERANS TWISTING IN THE WIND, by REFUSING to make the MURRAY AMENDMENT (to fund $2.7 billion dollars for Veteran's care and rehab, shot down on a party-line vote by the lying Repuglicans) into a sound-bite, prime-time newscast issue. The Cowering Democrats seem to think that merely voting in the Senate for an issue, only to be steamrolled by the bush-rove-cheney Republican corruption machine, constitutes the full measure of "leadership."
___________________________________________
Don Rumsfeld, America's Biggest Flop Ever
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Mike Whitney
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/03/con06112.html
Donald Rumsfeld will feature prominently in the chronicle of military history. His name can be affixed to every major strategic catastrophe since the inception of the Iraq war 3 years ago. Rumsfeld now ranks among the greatest bunglers of all time. His litany of failures reads like a journeyman’s manual for military defeat, rather than a blueprint for peaceful occupation. His performance as Sec-Def makes George Armstrong Custer look like Erwin Rommel.
Under Rumsfeld’s leadership the “cakewalk” war has morphed into an “unwinnable” quagmire; sucking men and resources into its vortex at an unimaginable rate. The occupation of Iraq “should have been simple” says political analyst Noam Chomsky, but under Rumsfeld’s stewardship, it has become more difficult than the Nazi occupation of France.
Only in Bush-world would such manifest incompetence be lauded as achievement.
“You’re doin’ a heck-of-a job, Rummy.”
The decision to invade Iraq with a paltry force of 150,000 men was all Rumsfeld’s. His narrow views of a smaller, more agile military blinded him to the requirements of a massive occupation. When challenged on the topic by military professionals, like General Shinseki, Rumsfeld brusquely dispatched the decorated veteran to an early retirement.
Rumsfeld’s shortsightedness had a dramatic affect on the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground. As the looting of museums and government buildings persisted for weeks, destroying any hope to quickly establish order, Rumsfeld breezily brushed off criticism of the lawlessness saying, “Stuff happens.”
Those first weeks exposed the callous disregard for the safety and security of the Iraqi people and become the rallying cry for the nascent resistance that would later sweep through the Sunni heartland.
The lack of troop-strength made it impossible for the military to safeguard the mammoth armories and ammunition-dumps left behind by Saddam. Members of the fledgling resistance were free to remove truckloads of weaponry and bomb-making material that would later be used to kill American soldiers. The number of American casualties would be considerably lower had Rumsfeld paid attention to his generals and increased the size of the occupation army.
We know from Paul Bremer’s recent comments that Rumsfeld never anticipated the massive resistance to the American presence. He ignored the State Dept’s plans for occupation assuming that American troops would be greeted as liberators. Even when clear signs appeared of a full-throated rebellion, Rumsfeld dismissed the violence as the work of “Saddam loyalists and dead-enders.”
There was no strategy for keeping civil society running. In fact, Iraq became a laboratory for applying a neoliberal-model that was completely foreign to the native people. The results were catastrophic. Unemployment soared, subsidies were stripped away, prices skyrocketed, unions were banned, and Iraqi society went into a state of shock.
More disastrous, was Rumsfeld’s plan for de-Ba’athification. Normally, imperial powers leave as much of the existing government as possible to allow for the smooth transition from one ruling party to the next. Rather than finding common ground with members of the former regime, Rumsfeld chose to destroy every trace of Ba’ath rule forcing a restructuring of the entire political establishment from the ground up. This was an unbelievably stupid move that upset the continuity between governments.
It was equally foolish to disband the Iraqi military; sending home 450,000 fully-armed soldiers without pay or job prospects. It should have been easy to anticipate that many of these disgruntled recruits would wind up fighting against the occupation.
And, why didn’t Rumsfeld bring in military police to deal with the protests, civil disputes, routine patrols and peacekeeping duties? Instead, those tasks were assigned to trigger-happy army regulars who over-reacted in tense situations oftentimes killing innocent civilians and alienating the public. Soldiers are clearly not trained to handle these duties.
It was Rumsfeld who ordered the leveling of Falluja; a gratuitous act of homicidal vengeance which galvanized the resistance and generated a firestorm of reprisals across the Sunni triangle. For Iraqis, Falluja represents the turning point in the American occupation. Even cautious Iraqis must have seen that their predicament no longer provided any viable political options.
The details of Rumsfeld’s charnel house at Abu Ghraib provided even more fuel for the resistance. The Defense Secretary chose to jettison America’s threadbare moral authority simply to extort information from farmers and city people. Imagine the boost in recruitment for the resistance after photos of the perverted treatment of detainees appeared in the media?
Rumsfeld lashed out at the media for displaying the pictures of abused Iraqis to the public and discounted claims that the torture was authorized at the highest levels of the defense establishment. It’s clear now that the paper trail for the abuse leads straight to Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld dismissed the charges as the work, “of a few bad apples.”
Abu Ghraib eliminated any prospect for mutual trust between the warring parties. Now, there’s no hope that the conflict will be resolved through political negotiation.
The current wave of sectarian violence is also Rumsfeld’s doing. It is a re-creation of the terror-campaign that swept through El Salvador during the 1980s. The Interior Ministry has adopted the “Salvador Option” -- a reference to the death squads that plagued that country throughout the Reagan era.
The up-tick in violence suggests that the military no longer sees peace and security as achievable so, instead, is pursuing a policy of widespread anarchy disguised as sectarian violence. The end-game is the balkanization of the country into small, manageable statelets that are easier to exploit for their resources.
The present situation in Iraq can only be described as nightmarish; and endless cycle of bombings, brutality and butchery all concealed behind a screen of media-generated disinformation.
Rumsfeld accepts no responsibility for Iraq’s downward-spiral or the incalculable suffering he has engendered. Instead, he points the finger at the least likely candidate for blame; the media.
“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but our country has not,” Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations. “The violent extremists have established ‘media relations committees’—and have proven to be highly successful at manipulating opinion-elites. They plan to design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communications to intimidate and break the collective will of free people.”
The bungled occupation of Iraq has nothing to do “violent extremists” who’ve “successfully manipulated opinion-elites.” In fact, it has nothing to do with media at all. For the most part, the fault lies with one man, Donald Rumsfeld, a buck-passing narcissist who sees the world through the jaundiced lens of his own blinkered vanity.
Major General Paul Eaton summarized Rumsfeld’s performance better than anyone else:
“Rumsfeld has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld is a self-deluded megalomaniac who has heaped disgrace on himself and his country. It will take more than his customary glib repartee or slick excuse-making to distance himself from his ultimate legacy as America’s biggest flop.
posted by verifi at 7:32 AM
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