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So Rumsfeld sent a memo to Bush two days before his resignation calling for a drastic change of course in Iraq, along with 21 “ideas” on how to change course.

Where were these “ideas” prior to the election? Was it so important to cling to power that trying to win the election by “staying the course” of a sinking ship was more important than the thousands of lives and billions of dollars lost? Or is Rumsfeld simply so arrogant that he could only admit defeat by poo pooing the whole endeavor on his way out the door?

It’s not as if the “ideas” in the memo show any depth of analysis. They sound more akin to the kind of garbage you would put on powerpoint slides to bumbling, clueless corporate executives who have no knowledge of what’s going on underneath them, to give them the illusion that their shops are being creative and getting work done. Examples:

• “Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis….This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ “
• “Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist.”
• “Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start ‘taking our hand off the bicycle seat’), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up, and take responsibility for their country.”

It’s pathetic that the US course on Iraq has come down to nothing more than feel-good “corporate speak” without any real analysis or thought given to how to implement them or to the consequences of delaying a change of course until it was more politically convenient.

As for Rumsfeld, he will probably go down in history as one of the most incompetent DoD Secretaries ever. If he really felt this way, that the course in Iraq was a bad one, he had a duty to himself, his troops and his country to make the case as soon as he felt it necessary. By withholding his opinion until he was shown the door demonstrates he was nothing but a spineless puppet who didn’t give a damn about the thousands of men and women who have given their lives in furtherance of this miserable adventure.

It came as too little, too late. Our tone-deaf Commander in Chief, who as late as last week insisted Rumsfeld would remain through the end of Bush’s term, announced Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down as Secretary of Defense after facing the humiliating loss of the House and (probably) the Senate.

Rumsfeld was responsible for the disastrous prosecution of the war in Iraq and its aftermath. His insistence on running the military like a corporation and refusing to listen to the truth of the reality on the ground helped ensure that the US got stuck in the dreadful quagmire in which it finds itself. His only answer to criticism of his handling of the war was to tell critics to “back off” and essentially “trust him” as US soldiers and Iraqis continue to die by the scores.
Good-bye and good riddance. He will not be missed.

Donald Rumsfeld was clapping his yap trap today before a group of veterans, saying war critics suffer from “moral or intellectual confusion” about what it takes to defeat terrorism, and that opposing the war is akin to people who tried to appease the Nazis. Given that a majority of Americans now oppose the war, I suppose that means that most of us are unpatriotic sympathizers of terrorism.

Who is it that war critics are trying to appease? How is the war in Iraq in any way related to the war on terror, except insofar that it has CREATED terrorists by the bucketload where none existed before?

Opposition to the war in Iraq has nothing to do with being tough on terrorism. Nobody is advocating that we expose ourselves to terrorist attack, and nobody is suggesting we not aggressively fight terrorist threats. What war critics contend is that the war in Iraq was wrong and unrelated to terrorism, and in fact makes the nation more vulnerable to terrorism because of the misallocation of resources that could be better spent on security measures.

Rumsfeld’s argument relies on the continuing fallacy that September 11th and Saddam Hussein were linked, when they were not. If you admit they are not linked, as you must given the weight of the evidence, then words like Rumsfeld’s become nothing more than stupid empty rhetoric from an incompetent bureaucrat, and show that he is indeed morally and intellectually confused.

It seems the British ambassador to Iraq isn’t the only one being candid these days–generals testifying before Congress today are offering a similarly bleak assessment on the likelihood of Iraq devolving into civil war.

“I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it,” Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed Abizaid’s observation, saying “We do have the possibility of that devolving into civil war.” He said whether this occurs depends on the Iraqis more than on the U.S. military. “Shiite and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other,” Pace said, before the tensions can be overcome. “The weight of that must be on the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government.”

God save us all.

The assessment comes amid reports that up to 2/3 of army units are not in a state of operational readiness because of the strain and damage their equipment has suffered in Iraq. I’m sure that makes our military’s men and women feel really confident about their likelihood of survival in a mission that makes no sense.

Thankfully Donald Rumsfeld decided he wasn’t “too busy” after all to testify about this ever-worsening fracas and his disastrous policies before the US Congress.