I heard this quote from Rumsfeld when Bush was introducing the CIA fellow gates.
These past years, six years, it's been quite a time. It recalls to mind the statement by Winston Churchill, something to the effect that: I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof.
The great respect that I have for your leadership, Mr. President, in this little-understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century -- it is not well-known, it was not well-understood; it is complex for people to comprehend.
Well well, see you Americans are simply too stupid to understand the Iraq War. See Mr. Rumsfeld doesn't have to sugarcoat his opinion of everyone now. It's much the same way that Rumsfeld is too stupid to consider that anyone but him has any clue that it's not going well and that anyone who had any knowledge of history or military warfare would have been more than happy to mention the difficulties that we would run into. At no time in the number of years since the Iraq War has been engaged has the Secretary of Defense stopped to consider that he is in error in what he is doing. It's a fact, he can't see it, he couldn't see it, he will never ever see the truth of what he has done. He has pushed the military to the breaking point and kept on pushing. He has shrunk the military while extending the operations that the military has had to perform. Arrogant, asinine and history will not be kind in any fashion. It will say that Rumsfeld is someone who locked into the idea of a type of military that is a response to the fluid of nature of war in some circumstances and he attempted to apply that type of military to every military situation. The military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't the future-high tech war he envisions but rather the pedestrian 'boots on the ground' kind of war that requires those types of solutions. More soldiers, military instead of political decision making in order to win the war. We're talking 4 to 5 hundred thousand soldiers, actual bombing, blowing enemies up and all the rough horrible parts of war that Rumsfeld has avoided and thereby avoiding any sort of victory. Instead thinking that the people would stand for the slow, continual drip drip of casualties to no apparent purpose other than to simply 'hold' a center hoping that political and economic circumstances chance and magically dry up the supply of young Iraq and muslim men who want to fight against the American goliath. The only problem is that the American Goliath is individual young men and women who do not deserve to be pawns in an incorrectly assesed geopolitical chess like battle.
