All Four Leading Military Newspapers Will Call for Rumsfeld to Resign
From Editor and Publisher:
They have the text of the editorial there, too -- follow the link.
The gist of it is that the military is fed up with being lied to and military leaders have "misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success."
You know Rumsfeld is going to stay, even though the troops have no confidence in him. He's doing a heckuva job. He's not going anywhere.
A paragraph or two or three:
01.20.09... Can we wait that long?
An editorial set to appear on Monday -- election eve -- in four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The papers are the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. President Bush said this week that he wanted Rumsfeld to serve out the next two years. 4 Leading Military Papers: 'Rumsfeld Must Go'
They have the text of the editorial there, too -- follow the link.
The gist of it is that the military is fed up with being lied to and military leaders have "misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success."
You know Rumsfeld is going to stay, even though the troops have no confidence in him. He's doing a heckuva job. He's not going anywhere.
A paragraph or two or three:
These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.
And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.
Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.
01.20.09... Can we wait that long?
posted by JimK at 12:57 AM
5 Comments:
Meanwhile, here in Maryland:
"Ehrlich returns campaign money
Half-million funneled through federal account in violation of state law
By John Fritze
Sun Reporter
Originally published November 3, 2006
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has returned a half-million dollars in political contributions that were funneled through a federal account after the Maryland State Board of Elections said the money shifting violated state law, according to campaign officials and documents released yesterday.
Use of the federal account to pay for the governor's re-election effort, which was first revealed in The Sun in August, allowed Ehrlich to receive large sums of in-kind contributions from the Maryland Republican Party and increase the campaign's resources by bypassing a $4,000 donation cap set by state law....
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/elections/bal-md.federal03nov03,0,670519.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
Oh, come on. I'd agree Rumsfeld hasn't made the best decisions but TTF and gang aren't all upset about tactics. They were opposed to the war to begin with, believe Saddam's regime was acceptable enough to not be worth fighting against and hope America loses now.
Let's hear their ideas for a good resolution now.
Oh, come on. I'd agree Rumsfeld hasn't made the best decisions but TTF and gang aren't all upset about tactics. They were opposed to the war to begin with, believe Saddam's regime was acceptable enough to not be worth fighting against and hope America loses now.
Let's hear their ideas for a good resolution now.
Anon said..."Let's hear their ideas for a good resolution now."
I don't expect TTF has "ideas for a good resolution" about Bush's Blunder in Iraq given that TTF was formed to support medically accurate, abstinence-based comprehensive and inclusive sex education in MCPS. What's interesting is to see what the neocons, who sold the US on invading and occupying Iraq by telling us "it'll be a cakewalk...they'll greet us as liberators with flowers and candies," are saying now that the QUAGMIRE Iraq has become plays out for all the world to see.
Richard Perle
Back in 2003, Richard Perle told us, "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder.
But nowadays, Richard Perle, who was the chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 2001-2004 and was the one who "invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11, [says] "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'" I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
David Frum
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.
Kenneth Adelman
Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."
Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."
Eliot Cohen
Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess. I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems. The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."
http://tinyurl.com/ydgpdc
Has Bush said " good job, Rummy" again?
Anon, America is losing every day- with this wonderful plan you are supporting. We lost almost 3000 servicemen and women and tens of thousands more are coming home badly wounded. The huge monetary cost is serving only those crooked contractors who charge $100 for a load of laundry and $45 for a six pack of coke- canned right in that part of the world. So many things are wrong- no- we don't have a solution but some people do- besides to continue on in this insane manner.
Post a Comment
<< Home