Bluntly said, Donald Rumsfeld should resign or be fired immediately. He has completely miss-managed a failed occupational overthrow of a once sovereign nation, with a blundering plan that has cost us the lives of nearly 2,600 Americans, wounded over 18,000 more and killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Rumsfeld's glib demeanor and rigid demands, along with his refusal to change tactics or to admit defeat, now has the U.S., our soldiers and the world staring down an anarchical, civil war in Iraq.
The heavy-handed Secretary of Defense, who claims "[he] never painted a rosy picture" about invading Iraq, during a recent Senate hearing, has done precisely the opposite. Among the many prevarications in the past about his now less than sanguine portrait of Iraq, Rumsfeld stated in February of 2003, "There is no question but that they (American forces) would be welcomed". The boom in bloodshed, the unhappy majority of Americans with the handling of the war and the recent calls from two, prominent Senators for Rumsfeld to resign, all suggest its time for Rummy to go.
Rumsfeld and his counterpart, Vice-President Dick Cheney, once wryly claimed that America would be heralded as liberators and the bearers of democracy as they feigned and finagled a plot of endless terror and macabre to rain down on Iraq. The reward for such an apathetic policy of obstinacy is hundreds of thousands of Shiites now marching through the streets of Baghdad chanting, "Death to America". The bold campaigners then burned American flags and proclaimed, "Saddam and Bush, Two Faces of One Coin". These actions are hardly a ringing endorsement of their appreciation of Rumsfeld's definition of deliverance.
The preposterous answer to this recent massive sectarian upheaval - send in more troops to deal with Iraq's enormous strife - demonstrates his (Rumsfeld) complete failure as a Defense Secretary to understand the lethal dangers of staying the course, over and over again. As the debt precariously mounts and the bodies pile higher than the once gleaming, twin-towers that this imprudent provocation was allegedly engineered in retaliation for their precipitous fall, now casts an immense shadow of angst and outrage across American landscape. More aptly put, adding further fuel to an already out of control fire is never a suitable method for containment.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". Not only is Rumsfeld lining up our soldiers for the "same thing" but more of it! This lunacy must come to an abrupt end. Throwing an endless parade of money and soldiers, at a problem that will never be solved at the working-end of a rifle, absent a lucid, alternative plan is destine to be a monumental failure for America! It must now be realized that violence begets violence and no amount of external force will solve a vastly internal problem.
The certain addition of many more names added to the list of slain U.S. service men and woman, from unnecessary combat in the Middle-East, will be matched only by the depth of shame and despair most Americans now share. This virulent, futile exercise of nation building and failed foreign polices by incompetent leaders, such as Rumsfeld, depicts a vacuous image of a man whose inerrant belief in his ability is more abject than able-minded.
There can be nothing more tragic than attempting to honor those who died in a falsehood for freedom, than to allow more precious lives to be squandered for a cause that serves only to shield those that unwittingly imparted on us all such a subversive act from their own humiliation and disgrace. Gravely, sending in additional troops to Iraq, up to 5,000 more, is precisely what Rumsfeld has staidly ordered.
It is abundantly clear that a changing of the guards, at the top, and the immediate withdraw of our troops is the only meaningful recourse to a disastrous, unfounded and baseless war of aggression. This war, guided by our meddling hand, which has plunged Iraq from a once stable country into a total state of mayhem, serves notice that an about-face is long overdue. Donald Rumsfeld, now in complete dereliction of his duty, once said he expected the conflict in Iraq to "[last] no more than six months". He could have not been more egregiously wrong or proved to be so woefully inept.
