Rumsfeld under attack from the right

Tip from MEJ's Bill in DC

First it was Chuck Hagel then John McCain and now it's Bill Kristol super hawk saying Rumsfeld must go.

"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,

in a town hall meeting with soldiers at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Dec. 8.

Actually, we have a pretty terrific Army. It's performed a lot better in this war than the secretary of defense has. President Bush has nonetheless decided to stick for now with the defense secretary we have, perhaps because he doesn't want to make a change until after the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. But surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term.

Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld.

We have seen how the President likes to reward incompetence with the promotion of Dr. Rice, who had never figured out what her first job was, and the presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the men who are responsible for the mess in Iraq is another. Rumsfeld's incompetence, arrogance and total inability to take responsibility is beyond belief. Kristol gives us this example:

But then, what about his statement earlier last week, when asked about troop levels? "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control." Really? Well, "the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted."

Leave aside the fact that the issue is not "the number of troops we had for the invasion" but rather the number of troops we have had for postwar stabilization. Leave aside the fact that Gen. Tommy Franks had projected that he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task -- and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him that tens of thousands of international troops would be available. Leave aside the fact that Rumsfeld has only grudgingly and belatedly been willing to adjust even a little bit to realities on the ground since April 2003. And leave aside the fact that if our generals have been under pressure not to request more troops in Iraq for fear of stretching the military too thin, this is a consequence of Rumsfeld's refusal to increase the size of the military after Sept. 11.

In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after a fashion: "I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine." Except he fails to take responsibility.

But Dubya continues to feel in his gut that Rumsfeld is the right man for the job and Dubya's gut is getting us deeper in the hole everyday.