Donald Rumsfeld is Bizarre
Observe:
“Our goal has to be to reduce our forces down, and to do it at a pace where we recognized that we’re going to—I almost said ‘make a mistake.’ It will look like a mistake. It’s a judgment call. We’re going to have to pull out of some pieces of real estate and turn over things to Iraqis, and they’re going to drop the ball.
The guy sounds like Wesley Willis.
If I understand him correctly, though, he means pulling out of Iraq is going to be messy. Which leads to my larger point: Rumsfeld can be disarmingly honest with the press. Honest in a foot-in-mouth kind of way. Further examples:
(Cluster bombs are) being used on frontline al Qaeda and Taliban troops to try to kill them is why we’re using them, to be perfectly blunt.
You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
What do these gems show? They show that our Secretary of Defense is a realist. He is a realist who believes Gitmo is full of “bad people,” and who thinks radical Islamists are better at demagoguery than the US government. On both of these counts he is probably right.
But do we want to keep all the bad people we meet locked up indefinitely without trial? Do we want to get better at propaganda and lies than Osama bin Laden? I’d say no, but these are the kind of questions we need to be asking ourselves.
Not, “do we want a world without terror?” Or “do we want to spread democracy everywhere?” Those are idealist questions. They are Bush questions.
If we want to debate the real issues, we need to listen more carefully to Rumsfeld.