Today's Washington Post magazine
feature on Donald Rumsfeld made me want to rip Rummy's arm off and beat him to death with it. Staff writer David Von Drehle convincingly lays the blame for the disastrous bungling of the Iraq war squarely at the SecDef's feet.
It makes me dizzy with rage to think this self-satisfied hack is still in office - but it's not surprising. Recently I ran across a 2000 NYTimes piece (posted for free here) on a study showing that incompetence is usually accompanied by supreme self-confidence:
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Dr. Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dr. Dunning.
More below.
Von Drehle makes his case:
Editing and badgering, Rumsfeld cut the troop strength in the invasion plan by more than half, and cut the deployment time by months. ... When Army generals urged him instead to load the Iraq conveyor belt with enough troops to fully occupy the country -- securing captured weapons depots, patrolling borders, ensuring order -- Rumsfeld saw the large fixed cost involved in recruiting and training thousands of new troops...
Rummy used every bureaucratic dirty trick in the book to cut Colin Powell out of the planning loop so Powell couldn't push his tired old strategy of overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy. So quaint!
Now, Rummy did offer to resign twice over the Abu Ghraib scandal (after all, as Von Drehle points out, Rumsfeld "cut the time for training National Guard units, including the ones that wound up photographing themselves with naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison."), but doggedly loyal, stupid-as-fuck Georgie turned him down - and in the piece, Rumsfeld's smarmy flack Lawrence DiRita crows about it:
"The ramparts of Washington are littered with the bleached bones of people who said Donald Rumsfeld was not going to survive," DiRita says happily.
Could this guy be more of a smug fuck? Sneering about Rumsfeld's political victims while the bones of the people who have died for his mistakes literally are bleaching in the Iraqi desert.
Von Drehle hit a home run with this one. He cites a few hopeful signs that America's strategy is increasingly reality-based, but makes it clear that any improvements have come in spite of rather than because of administration policy.