Got this from a family friend, thought I’d share the interesting read…most of her stuff is good
> April 19, 2006
> Op-Ed Columnist
> The Decider Sticks With the Derider
>
> By MAUREEN DOWD
> WASHINGTON
>
> At first Rummy was reluctant to talk about the agonizing generals’
> belated objections to the irrational and bullying decisions that led
> to carnage in Iraq. The rebellious retired brass complain that the
> defense chief was contemptuous of advice from his military officers
> and sabotaged the Iraq mission with willful misjudgments before and
> after the invasion.
>
> “I kind of would prefer to let a little time walk over it,” Rummy told
> reporters at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. But seconds later, he let
> loose a river of ruminations, a Shakespearean, or maybe Nixonian,
> soliloquy that showed such a breathtaking lack of comprehension that
> it was touching, in a perverse way.
>
> He flailed and floundered through anecdotes from his first and second
> stints at the Pentagon, arguing that he drew criticism because he was
> a change agent, trying to transform the lumbering military > bureaucracy.
>
> He talked about things that most people wouldn’t understand — how 30
> years ago he chose a M-1 battle tank with a 120-millimeter cannon and
> turbine engine instead of the 105-howitzer and diesel engine the Army
> had wanted. He babbled on about reforms in the Unified Command Plan,
> the Defense Logistics System, the Quadrennial Defense Reviews and the
> National Security Personnel System and about going from
> “service-centric war fighting to deconfliction war fighting, to
> interoperability and now towards interdependence.”
>
> When you yank the military from the 20th-century industrial age to the
> 21st-century information age, Rummy said, you’re bound to cause “a lot
> of ruffles.”
>
> Asked why he twice offered to resign during the Abu Ghraib prison
> abuse scandal but has not this time, Rummy smiled and replied, “Oh,
> just call it idiosyncratic.”
>
> Idiosyncratic, indeed, with Iraq in chaos, the military riven and
> depleted, the president poleaxed, the Republican fortunes for the
> midterm elections dwindling, and Republican lawmakers like Chuck Hagel
> questioning Rummy’s leadership and Democratic ones like Dick Durbin
> proposing a no-confidence vote in the Senate.
>
> The secretary made it sound as if the generals want him to resign
> because he made reforms. But they really want him to resign because he
> made gigantic, horrible, arrogant mistakes that will be taught in
> history classes forever.
>
> He suggested invading Iraq the day after 9/11. He didn’t want to
> invade Iraq because it was connected to 9/11. That was the part his
> neocon aides at the Pentagon, Wolfie and Doug Feith, had to concoct.
> Rummy wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would be easy,
> compared with Iran or North Korea, or compared with finding Osama. He
> could do it cheap and show off his vaunted transformation of the
> military into a sleek, lean fighting force.
>
> Cloistered in a macho monastery with “The Decider” (as W. calls
> himself), Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, Rummy didn’t want to hear
> dissent, or worries about Iraq, the tribes, the sects, the likelihood
> of insurgency or civil war, the need for more troops and armor to
> quell postwar eruptions.
>
> “He didn’t worry about the culture in Iraq,” said Bernard Trainor, the
> retired Marine general who is my former colleague and the co-author of
> “Cobra II.” "He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank.
> He could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn’t care, as
> long as he could send the message that you don’t mess with Hopalong
> Cassidy. He wanted to do to Saddam in the Middle East what he did to
> Shinseki in the Pentagon, make him an example, say, ‘I’m in charge,
> don’t mess with me.’ "
>
> The stoic Gen. Eric Shinseki finally spoke to Newsweek, conceding he
> had seen a former classmate wearing a cap emblazoned with “RIC WAS
> RIGHT” at West Point last fall. He said only that the Pentagon had “a
> lot of turmoil” before the invasion.
>
> Just as with Vietnam, when L.B.J. and Robert McNamara were running the
> war, or later, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over, we
> now have leaders obsessed with not seeming weak, or losing face. Their
> egos are feeding their delusions.
>
> Asked by Rush Limbaugh on Monday about progress in Iraq, Rummy
> replied, “Well, the progress has been good.” He said that if you
> always listened to critics about war, “we wouldn’t have won the
> Revolutionary War” or World War I or World War II, and America would
> have been a different country “if it existed at all.”
>
> But the conscience-stricken generals are not critics of war. They are
> critics of having a war run by a 73-year-old who thinks he’s a force
> for modernity when he’s really a force for fantasy. It’s time to
> change the change agent.
