Rummy and the Yes Men

Yesterday in the Capitol, Senator Edward Kennedy told Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld that the war in Iraq has become a "seeming intractable quagmire."

Rumsfeld looked around the witness table and said that none of the four star generals seated with him "agrees with you that we're in a quagmire and that there's no end in sight."

Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf; Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq; and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff then avowed that they agreed with their boss. What else were they going to do? The time to tell Rummy how wrong he is was a long time ago.

But if Abizaid, Casey, and Meyers had stood up to Rummy back then, they wouldn't have been sitting next to him in the Senate chamber yesterday. Everybody who stood up to Rummy in the beginning is gone.


Two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue, how they can deny the situation in Iraq is a "quagmire" defies logic and common sense. Maybe they don't like the sound of the word "quagmire." Perhaps they'd prefer predicament, difficulty, crisis, dilemma, perplexity, Gordian knot, quandary, entanglement, imbroglio, scrape, jam, fix, mess, muddle, morass, pickle, jam, or pinch.

Take your pick, fellahs...

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It's abundantly clear that the strategy in Iraq isn't working, no matter how vehemently Rummy and the Yes Men insist that it is.

Here's what Iraq veteran Paul Reichert has to say about the situation over there:

"The insurgents are getting better at attacking US and Iraqi forces. And they are made of much more than merely 'dead enders.' I know. My men and I were on the ground in Iraq for almost a year. We were attacked by them. We detained them. We killed them. And we saw a definite increase in the overall complexity of the attacks waged by them. And that increase in the sophistication of enemy tactics has only continued since we left."

But the powers that be have no intention of changing their strategy--they're determined to stick to a failed plan until it succeeds, no matter how long that may take.

And guess what? If the plan never succeeds, it won't be their fault!

Senator Joseph Lieberman told Rummy yesterday that he fears that "American public opinion is tipping away from this effort,"

Rummy answered, "I have a feeling they're getting pushed," an obvious reference to unfavorable reports on the war in the mainstream media. (Which is a ridiculous notion--the mainstream media have given the administration a pass on this war from the get-go.)

Rummy's loyal Labrador Abizaid picked up the drumstick. The troops are becoming aware of dropping public support for the war, and are asking him "whether or not they've got support from the American people." While he claims that confidence among the troops in the field "has never been higher," he has "never seen the lack of confidence greater" in Washington.

Here it comes, folks: the next chapter in the Karl Rove playbook. Failure in Iraq won't come as a result of their flawed strategy. It will come from your lack of confidence in their flawed strategy.

Please, please, please don't fall for this cynical propaganda. Don't sit by and be a "good little citizen." Don't let them turn America into one nation, under Bush, with war without end.

Peace,

JLH