President Bush sharpens his retirement skills; Rumsfeld reluctant to speculate

President Bush has shortened his current vacation to a mere ten days, partly in response to pressure from Cindy Sheehan and others who took issue with Bush's lax work habits.

The lame duck president is sharpening his retirement skills in Crawford again. I can't tell if this is good news anymore.

Few remember his record-setting vacation pace that was cut short by the events of September 11, 2001.

Fewer still remember those as the good old days, when you could count on Bush to be far from the White House and his yapping pack of incompetents not yet rolling our citizen soldiers into a 1000-year-old sectarian conflict in unarmored jury-rigged humvees.

As for our British "allies," holding on to the tattered and IED'd remnants of Empire, how can they be expected to have any good ideas in Iraq when they have made such a deadly mess of Ireland?

In the absence of good news from Iraq there is, well, more news:

Secretary for War Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday along with his two top generals in charge of the war in Iraq.

In response to direct questions from the Committee, both generals reluctantly admitted that until recently they had not considered the prospect of an Iraqi civil war. This answer, of course, makes no sense and isn’t true, but their boss was sitting at the table between the two of them and, of course, there is the idiot in the White House to consider.

The slim helping of good news is that, at long last, the top brass has placed the words “civil war” and “Iraq” in the same sentence in public and on the record.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the administration may need to seek new authorization from Congress to allow U.S. troops to fight in a civil war. Originally, the forces were authorized to topple Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party.

Senators from both parties questioned whether troops were adequately trained to fight in a civil war. If it comes to that, asked Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), "which side are we on?"

"I'm reluctant to speculate about that," Rumsfeld said. "It could lead to a discussion that suggests that we presume that's going to happen. . . . The government is holding together. The armed forces are holding together…They're waging a psychological war of attrition…They want us pointing fingers at each other rather than pointing fingers at them."

This is the giant intellect the nation is counting on to lead the armed forces. He says he's "reluctant to speculate," which leads us into a real fine segue to other developments:

Also yesterday, the Senate intelligence committee requested a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq…Nearly four years ago, the committee received an estimate that contended that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons in addition to an active nuclear weapons program.

That is going to be a hard act to follow. If only Rumsfeld had been "reluctant to speculate" back in the good old days.

You may have missed this New York Times editorial. The hearing was broadcast on C-Span:

The Sound of One Domino Falling

It’s been obvious for years that Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality, but the defense secretary now also seems stuck in a time warp. You could practically hear the dominoes falling as he told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday (August 3) that it was dangerous for Americans to even talk about how to end the war in Iraq.

“If we left Iraq prematurely,” he said, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.” And finally, he intoned, America will be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”

No one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new “enemy” that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.

Americans are frightened by the growing chaos in the Mideast, and the last thing they needed to hear this week was Mr. Rumsfeld laying blame for sectarian violence on a few Al Qaeda schemers. What they want is some assurance that the administration has a firm grasp on reality and has sensible, achievable goals that could lead to an end to the American involvement in Iraq with as little long-term damage as possible. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the same old exhortation to stay the course, without the slightest hint of what the course is, other than the rather obvious point that the Iraqis have to learn to run their own country.

By contrast, the generals flanking him were pillars of candor and practicality. Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander in the Middle East, said “Iraq could move toward civil war” if the sectarian violence — which he said “is probably as bad as I’ve seen it” — is not contained. The generals tried to be optimistic about the state of the Iraqi security forces, but it was hard. They had to acknowledge that a militia controls Basra, that powerful Iraqi government officials run armed bands that the Pentagon considers terrorist organizations financed by Iran, and that about a third of the Iraqi police force can’t be trusted to fight on the right side.

As for Mr. Rumsfeld, he suggested that lawmakers just leave everything up to him and the military command and stop talking about leaving Iraq. “We should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy,” he said.

Americans who once expected the Pentagon to win the war in Iraq have now been reduced to waiting for an indication that at least someone is minding the store. They won’t be comforted to hear Mr. Rumsfeld fretting about protecting Spain from Muslim occupation.

New York Times Editorial Published: August 4, 2006