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April 19, 2006
Confused Americans for Truth - The Key Question to Ask About Rumsfeld
The war against Donald Rumsfeld is kicking into high gear. Don Surber and Tribuna Libre both have interesting comments on the nature of the complaint against the Secretary of Defense, but to me, there's only one question that needs to be asked: how will getting rid of Rumsfeld help us win in Iraq?
In a sufficiently large organization, the person in charge gets advice from hundreds of different channels, filtered through a shifting cadre of subordinates. No matter what decision is made, there will be somebody whose advice was passed over. To come back years later and claim you were unjustly ignored is not all that different from a psychic who gets the front page of a tabloid because he was the one out of a hundred who guessed the correct number of hurricanes.
The generals are getting traction because the media believes Iraq is a failure. Rumsfeld doesn't (audio link). It sure as heck hasn't been a milk run over there, but the past six months have shown a downward trend in American deaths. In addition, during her recent trip to Iraq, Laura Ingraham found many reasons for optimism.
If Rumsfeld were replaced, what would change? Perhaps he'd listen to different people. But every Secretary of Defense is going to have to make the same choices, and those choices will be strongly influenced by a President who is not going to change.
Perhaps some people hope that a new Secretary of Defense would be more willing to pack up and go home, leaving the Iraqis to their own devices. But does anybody think the absence of U.S. forces will cause the terrorists in Iraq to give up? Or will they in fact go into high gear and take over like they did in Afghanistan? If these generals are so damn smart, then I want them to tell me how they will fix things over there. If the Iraq war is not going well, then we don't need a new Secretary of Defense, we need a new plan for victory. And if we're not getting that, then there's no difference between Rumsfeld's critics and a psychic who correctly predicted the Indian Ocean tsunami and completely missed the Katrina disaster.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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