Juan Cole on the memo by Donald Rumsfeld :
1. Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis...Informed Comment 03.Dec.06
2. Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss.
3. Rumsfeld openly admits that he wants to run Iraq just like Saddam did...
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1. Crisis for who? Not for the Israelis, our staunch ally in the Middle East, who in spite of that alliance have lost no soldiers in Iraq. A crisis for Iraq which means a powerless, crashing state, is not a crisis for everyone, anymore than the fall of the Soviet Union was, for all the misery it brought its citizens.
2. Possibly because "winning the war" was never a goal. Once you stop believing the liars who are setting the goal, defining what "winning" is, then what do you have?
Why did this happen? Whose interests are being served by this?
3. A proxy army controlling Iraq with an iron fist, as opposed to "liberating, democratizing, etc.", would fit with a plan to remove Iraq as a military presence in the Middle East. A liberated Iraq with a functioning economy and a viable independent Iraqi military wouldn't.
Once you admit the possibility that present conditions in Iraq were the reason for the invasion and occupation, it makes a lot more sense, and the seeming absurdities and outright insanities of these men, themselves disposable, who have proven themselves over and over to be skillful and conscienceless liars, look a lot more like cunning and craft than idiocy and failure.
