March 20, 2008 archive

The Next Excuse for Staying

“The war could last 6 days, 6 weeks… I doubt 6 months.”

— Donald Rumsfeld, Speaking on 2-7-2003, in Italy

Background

The same person who spoke those words also told us about building realities. I’m confused, Mr. Rumsfeld; did we set out to fail and succeed?

Rumsfeld was trying to be clever when he talked about zigzagging through false realities. He implied the deception was intended for “the enemy”, even while Cheney was saying 9/11 and Iraq to Tim Russert over and over on Press the Meat. If it were just a matter of evil people lying to us, then there would be nothing new here. What is new is that the evil liars were at the helm of a (supposedly) benevolent superpower, and the evil liars were hopelessly inept to a degree that is almost supernatural.

Some statistics are frightening, but that doesn’t make them wrong – only unbelievable to some. For instance, 50% of all doctors graduated at the bottom half of their class, but 80% of the people think theirs is an above average doctor. In order to take a realistic measure of this administrations ineptness in prosecuting this war, we have to strip it down to the basics and try to separate fact from fallacy.

Was the premise of the war correct? No: there were no WMD’s.

Did we forget anything before we went all the way there? Yes: divisions of soldiers.

Were candy and hugs the only arms and projectiles we faced? No.

How many dead-enders is a few dead-enders?

Edited to move content below the fold – OTB

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