Joe Lieberman should
set his worries aside. Don Rumsfeld, always the thorough planner, won't be out on the streets when he's unceremoniously expelled from DoD in November; he won't be forced to eek out a living on his
$58.8 million - $185.1 million [pdf] nest egg. He's already auditioning for a job: the newest addition to the
Pajamas Media cartel.
You can tell he's been practicing. Here's what he said two days ago:
Q Is the country closer to a civil war?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.
Transcript, July 25, 2006
Compare to this from March:
Q What is the difference in your mind between sectarian violence and civil war?
SEC. RUMSFELD: You know, it's a good question, and we have been trying to look for a way to characterize what are the ingredients of a civil war, and how would you know if there was one, and what would it look like, and what might be its progression, either up to increased violence or down to less violence. And it's a hard thing to do, and people are analyzing that and thinking about it. And I think until I've had a chance to think more about it and -- I will say, I don't think it'll look like the United States' civil war.
Transcript, March 14, 2006
A vast improvement! Think what a great chance the Secretary will have to really show his stuff once he's unleashed from the traitor-riddled bureaucracies at the Department of State, the CIA, and yes, even DoD...
- He won't have to wait four months to find the free time to think about what a civil war might look like in Iraq.
- He won't have to rely on guesswork to estimate the number of provinces in Iraq; Wikipedia is only a click away (there are 18, by the way).
- He'll quickly be able to Google up the fact that Baghdad province "is the country's major transportation hub, the center of political and economic power, and home to more than 20 percent of the population." Civil war in Baghdad means civil war in Iraq, regardless of stability in desolate desert or ethnically homogeneous regions.
- He'll be able to get a feel for how the civil war is penetrating even the Green zone, by reading fancy "Snapshots from the Office," like this one [pdf] from Ambassador Khalilzad.
- He'll be privy to analysis, like this from GAO [pdf], showing that only three of Iraq's 18 provinces are actually secure, all three in the Kurdish controlled North -- that in total, "eight provinces have functioning governments with problems in delivering services and dealing with security. The remaining seven provinces are in serious or critical condition, with Anbar province rated as critical." Heck, once freed from the bureaucracy, he'll even be able to read province-by-province break downs like this one [pdf], pretty colors and all.
Imagine: Rumsfeld, unfettered, unleashed, liberated from unreliable government information. Don't worry, Senator Lieberman. Rumsfeld will pull through.