Rumsfeld is history and I doubt very much that history will judge him kindly.
I've felt all along that he was right in trying to redirect the make-up of the US armed forces to one that used smaller, more mobile forces (aka special forces). That is necessary for the US to compete on the battlefields where the wars of this century will be fought.
However his inflexibility in Iraq, his inability to correct his mistakes, and his arrogance toward those who understood the problem better than he, have led to the US being embroiled in a war it cannot win (in Iraq at least) against an enemy that cannot be defeated in open battle. He thought he knew better than Bush I and James Baker (his Secretary of State) who made the then very-unpopular decision not to go into Iraq and remove Saddam.
I confess I was quite wrong at the time. I thought, as many did, that they should have removed Saddam. Time has proved them right and me wrong. It would have been a terrible mistake then and it has proved so now.
Withdraw to Kurdistan and southern Iraq and let the Sunnis kill each other. Fortify Kurdistan and do a deal with the Turks to push a pipeline west to the Med.
You get your oil, a defensible border, and stop your young men and women dying pointlessly. At this point, there doesn't seem to be any alternative and it's better to just accept it than waste time, lives and money pursuing a goal that cannot be achieved.
Let's hope a Democratically-controlled Congress has the balls to make it happen.
Posted by artandscience at November 9, 2006 10:16 AM