The Man Who Stayed Too Long - WSJ's Al Hunt

Sacking Don Rumsfeld for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures would be a bit like sending Al Capone away for income-tax evasion. It's not the offense on which he should be judged.

(snip)

Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld should be judged on his three-and-a-half year tenure at the Pentagon. Contrary to the glowing portrait painted by the White House the past few days, what that reveals is an increasingly demoralized military stretched beyond its limits -- the Army War College says the Army is near "its breaking point" -- and a Pentagon-run, post-Saddam Iraq, that has turned into one of the tragic miscalculations of contemporary American foreign policy.

The best military measurement is to compare performance with what was promised. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush, blasted the Clinton military as "low on parts, pay and morale," vowing to replace "uncertain missions with well-defined objectives." Dick Cheney noted that any president "leads the military built by those who came before him." Today, the Army, with the quagmire of Iraq, is charged with a mission that outstrips its resources; there are severe problems with parts and materials, and a growing number of flag officers are contemptuous of Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership. The president sworn in next January will inherit a military considerably more fragile than the one left by Bill Clinton.

(snip)

Many of these problems stem from Iraq, where Mr. Rumsfeld, with his characteristic talent for bureaucratic infighting, took total control of the post-invasion plans from the State Department. Virtually every one of the Pentagon's assumptions has proven wrong: the Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as liberators not occupiers; any resistance would be short and sporadic; other nations would follow as reconstruction began; Iraqi oil revenues, not American taxpayers, would foot the bill; and by now we would be winding down to fewer than 30,000 troops. Instead, American troops, casualties, costs and isolation all are rising. "The military usually plans for the worst and hopes for the best," notes Lawrence Korb, a Reagan administration Pentagon official and a Rumsfeld critic. "Rumsfeld planned for the best . . . and he got the worst."

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URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108440434904810149,00.html


mailto:al.hunt@wsj.com

Strange bedfellows, indeed. x(

Woodruff were trashing Clinton and praising the "Chimp-in-Thief" to keep your CNN high paying jobs!

Now, you tell us Clinton's Military was better than the "Whore who paid you...Shame on you Al Hunt! You should have gone beforeFriedman, but you and your "media whore" wife just raked in the$$$$$$$$$'s shilling for the PNAC Crowd.

You think we want to hear or read what you say now?? Fugedaboudit!
:grr:

GIFT horse in the mouth.