If Rumsfeld Is Driven Out, We All Lose (Rumsfeld apologist and biographer)

"War is hell," said Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and he was the man to know, having led troops in a war that took four years and killed roughly 618,000 American men.

If war is hell, warfare as currently conducted against mostly unseen bands of enemies in civilian dress hiding among bona fide civilians — and not even faintly comparable to the Civil War or other American wars of recent memory — is its own special kind of nightmare. Added to this nightmare is the knowledge that if we cannot extirpate them in their foreign hiding places, we will have to deal with them on our own shores.

And, in addition to this difficulty, grave enough, these days an outcry is being staged — and "staged" is the word — over casualties amounting to a few hundred. Now comes the latest scandal, over the behavior of a few prison guards in Iraq. This new scandal is no more than an election-season opportunity seized by certain serious opponents of the war, along with many more unserious opponents of the Bush administration.

No one doubts that the behavior of that handful of prison guards is impermissible and must be punished. Virtually everyone in the Bush administration, from the president and his Cabinet on down to the janitors in the White House, has by now declared it an outrage, demanding that the miscreants be brought to justice and the prison in which they performed their nefarious tricks be cleaned out and reorganized.

(more)

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-decter7may07,0,5271984.story?coll=la-news-comment

Look at the bottom of this op-ed piece

Definition of ersatz \AIR-sahts; UR-sats\, adjective:
Being a substitute or imitation, usually an inferior one.

So she seems to be implying people made up these incidents? Rumsfeld and Bush created a REAL threat to liberty all over the world with their desire for secrecy and their intention of holding themselves above the laws of humanity.
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from the article:
Aside from the part this ersatz scandal no doubt will be made to play in the Democratic presidential campaign, this tempest in a teapot about the brutal behavior of a small group of young thugs in wartime says something disturbing about us as a people. This country was assaulted and went to war and may be at war for a long time, for the terrorists who are out to get us have found support and will be provided with ever more dangerous weapons in and by countries beyond Iraq.

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I saw this woman on C-Span. If you think the soul is reflected on your face and expression (especially as you become older) her image during that segment gave you the creepy crawlees...
This is a snippet I found on the web about her:

The following comes from (and was adapted from) the March 9, 2003 Jim Lobe article "Family ties connect US right, Zionists":
"As godfather of the movement, Irving Kristol played mentor to Norman Podhoretz, the long-time but now-retired editor of Commentary, the influential monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Originally identified with the anti-war left in the mid-1960s, Podhoretz converted to neo-conservatism late in the decade and transformed the magazine into a main source of neo-conservative writing, despite the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community itself rejecting those positions.

"Podhoretz and his spouse, Midge Decter, a polemical powerhouse in her own right, created a formidable political team in the 1970s as they deserted the Democratic Party, and then, as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger -- like PNAC a coalition of mainly Jewish, neo-conservatives and more traditional right-wing hawks like Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- helped lay the foreign-policy foundation for the rise of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan's victory, Decter and Rumsfeld co-chaired the international offshoot of the committee, called" the Committee for the Free World.

"Out of such kindergarten stuff is fabricated the latest, and most joyful, assault on one of the most capable public servants in living memory.

Hold on for a second, I have to ... :puke:

Midge Dector (the author of this piece) demonstrates that she is INCAPABLE of understanding the damage done to America by the revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib, or the culpability of Rumsfeld in this sorry mess.

the DAMAGE:
What little chance might have remained to enlist the support of Iraqis or the Arab world in general has most likely been lost. The rage unleashed by the humiliation of Arabs at U.S. hands is going to recruit more terrorists and cost many lives.

the CULPABILITY:
Rumsfeld, in typical neocon fashion, discarded the Geneva Convention, established safeguards for preventing this kind of abuse, and any advice or complaints regarding what was going on. This "scandal" didn't erupt because of a few renegade prison guards or Democratic politicians siezing the issue -- it happened because reckless decisions made by Mr. Rumsfeld created the conditions that inevetiably led to the systematic abuse of prisoners.

Rumsfeld's IN-CAPABILITY:
Rumsfeld is one of the chief architects of this war and occupation, and therefore bears much of the blame for its failures. He dismissed the notion that hundreds of thousands of troops would be necessary to secure the peace, and he dismissed advice from anyone who wasn't one of his neoconservative cohorts. Mideast experts offered detailed analysis and plans for postwar Iraq, but in the neocon universe anything that contradicts their ideology or agenda is rejected or attacked.

Rumsfeld has repeatedly demonstrated he is INCAPABLE of adapting his conceptual grasp to encompass any reality that contradicts the neocon political agenda. He and the entire neocon cabal have done a tremendous disservice to the country they allegedly serve, and the lot of them will go down as one of the darkest chapters in our history.