An excellent essay by Anthony Lewis...
link
Rumsfeld's failures
Why is this man still secretary of defense?
By Anthony Lewis...
By the normal standards of business or government, Donald Rumsfeld should long since have resigned or been fired as secretary of defense.
The reason is not ideology, nor is it his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, horrifying though that may be. The reason is incompetence. His record in Iraq over the last 13 months is the most dramatically incompetent performance by a public official in recent American history.
Good stuff, more after the jump...
The speed with which Iraq unraveled was stunning, beginning immediately after the military victory. Mobs looted Iraqi institutions -- and for two months, incredibly, U.S. forces did nothing effective to stop it. Every Iraqi government department except the oil ministry was looted. The great national museum and the national library were ransacked. Looters took beds from hospitals, computers from universities.
It was a disaster for the occupation that followed. Electricity and water supplies were hurt. But the psychological damage was worse. Iraqis saw the occupying forces as being grotesquely unprepared to provide elementary security. The United States has never recovered from that loss of confidence. Asked about the looting at the time, Rumsfeld dismissed it as "untidiness."
...
It was Rumsfeld who thought it was wise to violate the third Geneva Convention, to which this country is a signatory, and unilaterally label all the prisoners held at Guantanamo as "unlawful combatants" -- without the right to the hearings required by the convention.
What I like about this...Lewis gives no quarter on Abu Ghraib. He is scathing. But that is just background - he hammers home the point that rumsfeld must go because we are losing the war.
I want to keep hearing this. There is a small chance that Bush will do the right thing and can the idiot. If so, it will be good for the country and politically good for us. If not, the fact that Bush refuses to can rumsfeld even though we are losing the war will become a wedge issue, fracturing the conservative base. Consider that Tom Clancy wrote a book condemning these fools.
To make it even nicer, the front page of my newspaper's opinion section has "RUMSFELD'S FAILURES" top center in 30-pt type. The incompetence is becoming absolutely undeniable by anyone.
(Let me know if there are problems following the link due to registration, etc.)