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Rumsfeld makes it official: we have no plan or intention to win
A friend reports to me that on Sunday morning on Fox News, Chris Wallace asked Secretary Rumsfeld (this is a paraphrase, click here for transcript): “You cannot say when we are going to win …” Rumsfeld replied: “We are not going to win it. We are going to let the Iraqis do it.” For a year and a half, like Nietzsche’s madman telling the people in the market place that God is dead, I’ve been repeating to anyone who would listen that we are not doing the things needed to win the war against our enemies in Iraq and that we don’t even have a strategy in place that could theoretically lead to our winning. At every stage of this mess, when the Ralph Peters and the Davis Hansons and the rest of the tribe of cheerleaders have been crying that this is the turning point (whatever the “this” of the moment was), this is the final stage, this is the hinge of fate rotating toward victory, I replied, no, there is no victory in the works here, there’s not even a serious pretence of victory in the works here. And now Rumsfeld has officially confirmed what I’ve been saying all along. He’s admitting that what we are really doing is treading water, merely keeping the situation from getting too much out of control, hoping to hand the situation over to the Iraqis in a year or so and leave. But does anyone remotely imagine that if the greatest military power on earth cannot defeat the terror insurgency, the new Iraqi army will be able to do so? I wrote last year at VFR that Bush’s policy was a fraud. A respected conservative upbraided me for this, since, he said, it suggested deliberate deceit on Bush’s part, so I deleted the word from the article. But does not Rumsfeld’s comment show that I was right? When I say this, I don’t mean to echo the left’s charge that “Bush lied,” i.e., that he started the war on a deceptive basis. I mean that ever since we occupied Iraq, Bush and his lieutenants and his journalistic supporters have striven to make us believe that we’re headed toward a certain goal, victory (however defined), and our servicemen (and servicewomen, to our everlasting shame) have been and are still being daily killed and maimed in the name of reaching that goal, not to mention the vast numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians being wiped out and maimed by daily terrorist attacks, while, increasingly during these past two years, if one paid attention to what was being said and done, it was evident that the impression Bush and his lieutenants have striven to create—that our goal is victory—was not true. What elaborate webs of deceit has Bush—this supposedly most honest of all presidents—woven for us. How many months ago did the administration privately determine on the point that Rumsfeld made public yesterday—that they have no intention of winning? Do Bush’s passionate supporters, who have invested so much in him and in defending him, feel used by him now, or will they immediately support this latest twist, just as they have automatically supported all his previous twists? If, after what I said above, readers still object to my use of the word “fraud,” I ask them to consider the gap between Bush’s self-righteous, sweeping rhetoric, that “If you’re not on our side you’re on our enemies’ side,” and his actual truckling with the Saudi regime which is the biggest generator of terrorists on earth, and which continues to spread virulent anti-U.S. propaganda in U.S. mosques and schools even as Bush has a chummy visit with the Saudi leader at Bush’s Crawford ranch; also consider Bush’s recent diplomatic openings to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iraqi terror insurgents. If such a jaw-dropping contradiction between rhetoric and reality does not deserve the name fraud, then nothing does.
In any case, what Rumsfeld’s announcement bodes for the war on terror is not good. It means that terrorists can hang us up, prevent us from carrying out our stated mission, and make all our grandiose claims look like hollow boasting. How badly the Iraq occupation was misconceived from the very start. Email entry |