Oh Snap, Donald Rumsfeld!

The clip above shows MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann taking down former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld more than a peg or two three years ago. It is still amazing how former President George W. Bush kept Rumsfeld as head of the Defense Department for close to six long years even though his incompetence was documented in books such as Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”. In my last blog entry I wrote a few words about the Bush Administration that were complimentary. I almost felt like taking a shower afterwards. These were generally speaking not good people.

Donald Rumsfeld reared his ugly head again a few days ago. He had listened to Barack Obama’s West Point speech where the president had announced his 30,000 man strong surge for Afghanistan, and noticed that Obama mentioned one of Rumsfeld’s failures, namely that the military request for more troops to fight the Taliban was ignored during the Bush Administration. Rumsfeld replied: “In the interest of better understanding the President’s announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President’s assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied.” I bet he didn’t count on the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, to give a swift reply. Here’s what he said: “In my tenure here, Gen. McKiernan specifically had a fairly substantial request for upwards of 20,000 forces which we couldn’t meet because they just weren’t there. They were in Iraq. I spoke out early that Afghanistan was under resourced… We didn’t have them because they were pushed to Iraq. We didn’t have the flexibility to move them. That was the priority of a previous president. We do what the president says and that’s what we did.” (Both quotes taken from here)

Case closed. How embarrassing for both Rumsfeld and Bush. Had it not been for them, this bloody war might have been over by now.

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