By now, we've all heard about Donald Rumsfeld's interview on Fox News Sunday. Rumsfeld, in direct contradiction of other administration members, suggested the Iraqi insurgency could last up to a dozen years.
"That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years," Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday."
Of course Rumsfeld was spouting bullshit, but that's nothing new. This time looks different, though. See, Rummy's got a tell worse than Teddy KGB's Oreos, and I can prove it. Follow me...
How'd that go again?
Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.
There's a huge difference between five years and twelve years, moreso at a cost of 50-100 coalition troops per month. Hell, we've barely passed the two-year mark, and Rumsfeld is telling us it could go on for another ten years? How do they calculate that it'll be twelve years?
Utter stupidity, that's how:
The discussion when I met with members of the Duma -- it was the relevant committee for this subject and there were probably
six, eight, ten, twelve of them and four or five of us, some Congressmen, Kurt Weldon, Jim Woolsey.
Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, also gave the strongest hint yesterday of what Operation Noble Eagle is all about. "I think what you will see evolve over the next
six, eight, ten, 12 months, probably over a period of years, is a coalition to help battle terrorists," he told CNN.
We'll make some tweaks, talk to some people about any remaining issues that have been worked out among people who had different views, and that we will in fact send up what we will consider the Quadrennial Defense Review roughly the way I've indicated previously, with a couple of big pieces that may take
six, eight, 10, 12 months, particularly in the personnel area, and a piece in the Guard and Reserve, which is something that merits a great deal of thought and attention by itself.
Some midlevel terrorist leaders also were killed in the U.S. bombing, he added.
"To our knowledge, none of the very top
six, eight, 10 people have been included in that," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.
I had said at an 8:00 o'clock breakfast that sometime in the next
two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department that contributes to -- That underpins peace and stability in our world.
"We hear
six, seven, eight, ten, twelve conflicting reports every day. I've stopped chasing them," he said. "We do know of certain knowledge that he is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead. And we know of certain knowledge that we don't know which of those happens to be the case."
Needless to say, we'd like to get the leaders, but as I've said a hundred times, if you handed me UBL today, there's still eight, ten, twelve people in al Qaeda alone that could operate that network. And would.
There's
six, eight, ten, twelve countries right now in Afghanistan with forces on the ground doing things. The United Kingdom has forces. Canada does. Australia does. Jordan does. A number of countries are involved.
[T]hat's why people like UBL [Osama bin Laden] and [Mullah] Omar seem to move every
six, eight, 10, 12 hours. Not because they like to travel, I don't think, but they're survivalists. They want to live. So we just have to keep after them.
The same thing with transformation. We can look at the research and development budget and the S&T [science & technology] budgets and say would we rather invest now for benefits
six, eight, ten years down in this area or that area?
I was asked in a Senate hearing to respond to a question by Senator Inouye. I did. And I said exactly what I have been saying for
six, eight, ten, twelve months. Nothing new, nothing notable, other than the truth, which is extremely important. And that is that there are a series of terrorist states that everyone knows which ones they are that have weapons of mass destruction. They have chemical weapons. They have biological weapons, for the most part. Some have or shortly will have nuclear weapons.
Well! I've just been asked the question that leads to an answer, which is then characterized as inflammatory in the media. And the question is, should I refuse to answer and therefore not be accused of being inflammatory or alarmist or something? Or should I just give the same honest answer I've given for
six, eight, 10, 12 months?
"We know they're in enough countries and have enough money and have enough leadership that you've got to expect they, in fact, are going to be back again," Rumsfeld said. "There have to be
six, eight, 10, 12, 15 people who know where the bank accounts are, who know people who were trained, who know what their techniques are, who can pick it up."
I say that not to be critical of the intelligence community, it stretches back over decades, but the fact is that it's a big world, there are a lot of closed societies, and we have historically had significant gaps in our knowledge, gaps where some significant event occurred in a country and we did not know about it -- in an important country tha! t we were looking at, a significant event, and we did not know it for
two years, four years, six, eight, 10 -- in case 12 years or 13 years before we became aware of that event.
We believe that there probably are
six, eight, ten people who knew where the bank accounts were and who had been involved in the conceptual development of plans and a good chunk of those are still around. I've got to believe there's
eight, ten, twelve people who could provide leadership.
He made no apology for the lack of detailed evidence in his account, saying: "It is not for us to prove anything.
"It is not possible to find hard evidence that something is going to happen
two, four, six, eight months or a year down the road.
"Even after it occurs it is very difficult to get perfect evidence. Our goal is not to go into a court of law and try to prove something to somebody."
What do you think attacks taking place all across the globe are? In the last 30 days there have been
six, eight or 10 terrorist attacks. The idea that dealing with Iraq would precipitate something that isn't currently going on misunderstands what's currently going on.
And you know, and you've got this scrap, and that scrap and this piece. And imagine if the president of the United States had had that
three or four, five, six, eight, 10 scraps of information possibly, and had gone to the country and the world and said, "We need to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban and stop the al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a terrorist training center and root out the al Qaeda terrorist network and other terrorist networks all across the globe, or we run the risk of suffering a September 11th-like attack."
We had, if you take the new national defense policy and the new force-sizing construct, that resulted from a group of us sitting in a room and talking probably
10, 12, 15 times for one to two hours at a time. And talking and discussing. And what about this and what about that?
[...]
The new defense strategy, the new force-sizing construct. There isn't a single big thing that we've done, and we've done
eight, ten, twelve, that he hasn't been a continuing contributing significant partner. And this period of two years has been a period of enormous change in the department.
Fear focuses the mind. And as the saying goes, it's your enemies that make you strong. And you get out in the marketplace and you simply have to compete or you go under. And you walk down any street, go through any street anywhere, you see stores that were in business for
three, four, six, eight, 10, 12 months and they're gone. And that's true of businesses.
Rumsfeld attempted to downplay the significance of the INC fighters in Iraq.
"There are, you know,
six, eight, 10 different activities going on on the part of people who are Iraqis, either Kurds or Shia or expatriates or people from within the country. And that's a good thing. They can be very helpful to us in a variety of ways, and we appreciate it," Rumsfeld said.
And, then to point out how much work was still ahead of us, I listed all of these
six, eight, 10 things that are on our priority list. They will, of necessity, follow along behind, although, as I said, when there happens to be a weapon of mass destruction suspect site in an area that we occupy, and if people have time, they'll look at it. And, then they'll send things out to be examined and looked at. We clearly have people dedicated to trying to find the prisoners of war, ours and others from the '91 war. And as we are successful in any of those things, we'll report them. Undoubtedly, there will be embedded reporters there when they happen and will report them.
Some Iraqis told American military that there were seven American service people in the area. They told them where they were, and they were somewhere
six, eight, ten kilometers south of Tikrit, as I understand it, and the service people went up and found them, and they rescued them and they're en route.
I could go on with
five, six, eight, ten more examples of places that we can use the stress on the force to get our act together, and to do a better job managing the taxpayers' money, and to do a better job managing our force in a way that's more respectful of the Guard and Reserve and their employers and their families.
We know, number one, that we have a lot of commitments around the world. We know that they're larger than they normally are. We know that some of them have been there for quite a while. The Sinai is two decades; Bosnia and Kosovo -- Bosnia, what now,
six, eight years. Iraq and Afghanistan -- Afghanistan, a year and a half; Iraq,
12, 15, 18 month -- weeks.
And we know that we are a target because we are in so many places in the world and that at the present time there have been charges brought against former President Bush, against this President Bush, against Vice President Cheney, against Colin Powell, against
six, eight, ten or twelve of our people, with alleged war crimes -- which are utter nonsense; they are just plain politics.
And I had
six, eight, ten people around the table who live here and who are engaged in it and who care about it and who are doing everything humanly possible on the military and civilian side and they gave me the opportunity to ask them questions on a variety of different subjects.
More U.S. troops from his standpoint would mean more force protection, more combat support, and he says that he's got about on a daily basis
fifteen, twelve, fifteen, eighteen incidents a day. They last two or three minutes.
[...]
[T]here are two or three terrorist states that are potentially going to be nuclear powers in the next
three or four, five, eight, ten, twelve years. That creates a different environment that we're going to be living in.
"The system that is in place is designed for an industrial age, and as a result, a number of people were only given
five, six, eight (or) 10 days' notification of their call-up," Rumsfeld told the committee. "And that's just not respectful of them and their employers and their family. And we're fixing that system. We cannot do that to the Guard and Reserve in terms of activation."
And then, what will happen is we'll probably roll out over a period of
four, six, eight years, maybe ten years, to get readjusted. We really have to go from a 20th century and the Cold War static defense concept to the 21st century, global war on terror, a much more flexible, lethal set of capabilities that enable us to do a lot more things differently than we have been in the past.
Of course the real world today is a single precision bomb can do what
six, eight or ten dumb bombs can do. So the idea that if you have ten dumb bombs and you reduce them by five and you replace them with smart bombs, the idea that you've got your capability in half is nonsense. You've actually vastly increased your capability. And we're all going to have to get our heads thinking that way about the future, and it's going to take us all some time.
If you'll think back to whenever it was, it seems like only yesterday that Berlin-Plus was fashioned after four and a half years of effort. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief and said gee, that's not bad. It isn't added capabilities, but it's a fairly reasonable approach, and it's sharply negotiated. Then now what,
eight, nine, ten, twelve months later we have a new iteration being proposed from the first one, since the end of Berlin-Plus.
"The infrastructure had decayed and it is still decayed," the defense chief said bluntly. "And it will take now probably
six, eight, 10 years to get it back to the place that it ought to be."
And these are not battle-hardened veterans. These are not people who have been in the military or the police or the border patrol or the National Guard for
two, four, six, eight years and had deployments and had experience and know the chain of command. The ministries are terribly weak. They didn't exist.
Jamie, every time somebody has thought it would be convenient to come up with something that they didn't know and they knew they didn't know -- that is to say the total cost or the date certain when something's going to happen -- in
two, four, six, eight, ten months they look foolish
The courage of our troops and the sacrifice of those that have fallen and were wounded is important. And the idea that you should just arbitrarily say this is going to happen on that date--think of it, the last administration did that in Bosnia. They said we'd be out by Christmas.
Six, eight, 10 years later, not out. It is misleading people to think that you know something you don't know. And we know we don't know.
"If [the insurgency] does go on for
four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever... it is going to be a problem for the people of Iraq," Rumsfeld said. "They're going to have to cope with that insurgency over time. They are ultimately going to be the ones who win over that insurgency."
So what does it mean? Looks to me like Rumsfeld doesn't want to commit to any kind of timeline so he'll just throw some numbers out there and hope it sticks.
This is just a collection of quotes I've found over the past day or two without heavy searching. I imagine we can find, oh, five, six, eight, maybe 10 or 12 more if we tried.