How Rummy Skewered Hillary

I've been thinking about Salena Zito's column all day. Salena's column talks about how Don Rumsfeld skewered Hillary Clinton when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. It all got started when Hillary went on a 12 minute diatribe directed squarely at Rumsfeld. Here's the heart of Hillary's diatribe:

Under your leadership there have been numerous errors in judgment that have led us to where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a full fledged insurgency and full blown sectarian conflict in Iraq. Now, whether you label it a civil war or not, it certainly has created a situation of extreme violence and the continuing loss of life among our troops and of the Iraqis. You did not go into Iraq with enough troops to establish law and order. You disbanded the entire Iraqi army, now we're trying to recreate it. You did not do enough planning for what is called Phase IV and rejected all the planning that had been done previously to maintain stability after the regime was overthrown. You underestimated the nature and strength of the insurgency, the sectarian violence, and the spread of Iranian influence.

Here's Rummy's response:

My goodness. First, I have tried to make notes and to follow the prepared statements you've presented.

First of all, it's true, there is sectarian conflict in Iraq and there is a loss of life and it's an unfortunate and tragic thing that that's taking place. And it is true that there are people who are attempting to prevent that government from being successful. And they are the people who are blowing up buildings and killing innocent men, women, and children and taking off the heads of people on television and the idea of their prevailing is unacceptable.

Second, you said the number of troops were wrong. I guess history will make a judgment on that. The number of troops that went in and the number of troops that were there every month since, and the number of troops that are there today reflected the best judgment of the military commanders on the ground, their superiors, General Pace, General Abizad, the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the President of the United States. I think it's not correct to assume that they were wrong numbers, and I don't think the evidence suggests that and it will be interesting to see what history decides. The balance between having too many and contributing to an insurgency by a feeling of occupation and the risk of having too few and having the security situation not be sufficient for the political progress to go forward, is a complicated set of decisions and I don't know that there's any guidebook that tells you how to do it. There's no rule book, there's no history for this. And the judgments that have been made have been made by exceedingly well-trained people, the gentleman sitting next to me, the people on the ground in Iraq. They were studied and examined and analyzed by the civilian leadership and by the President, and they were confirmed. So I think your assertion is at least debatable.

The idea that the army was disbanded I think is one that's kind of flying around. My impression is that, to a great extent, that army disbanded itself. Our forces came in so fast. It was made up of a lot of Shia conscripts who didn't want to be in it and thousands or at least many, many hundreds of Sunni generals who weren't about to hang around after Saddam Hussein and his sons and administration were replaced. The work to build a new army has included an awful lot of the people from the prior army, and it has benefited from that.

Rummy skewered Hillary with the "My goodness." As Salena says, "Rumsfeld does not suffer fools lightly. Clinton may have thought her wrecking-ball questions would be devastatingly effective. They weren't. "Wars are terrible things," Rumsfeld told me. "(But) we have to live in this world...We can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's not there.

I couldn't agree more. Hillary came across as a Deaniac who'd gone too long without a diatribe whereas Rummy came across as poised and armed with facts.

The truth is that Hillary is doing her best to not sounds too pro war without abandoning her vote for authorizing war. It's her attempt to triangulate an issue that can't be triangulated.

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Posted Monday, August 14, 2006 12:43 AM

July 2006 Posts

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