Krauthammer vs. Dowd on Rumsfeld
Posted by JOHN MCINTYRE | E-Mail This | Permalink | Email Author
Charles Krauthammer on Rumsfeld's legacy from last night's roundtable
on FOX's Special Report with Brit Hume:
The person who had the stature and experience to go after the
entrenched bureaucracy of the military and to want to change it to be
more light and adaptable, and that is a process that will be remembered
as a very big positive.
Secondly, he's the man who gave us these amazingly swift victories to
defeat and destroy enemy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq with an
economy and a swiftness nobody would ever have expected.
Remember also, we've gone five years without a terrorist attack. And
all of this is his legacy. Of course, obviously, is the stalemate in
Iraq, the decisions that were made early on, that were hard decisions,
some of them in retrospect were not right. But Iraq is still in play
and those who say his legacy is written on Iraq, I think are wrong. I
think we're going to see how it turns out.
Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times.
James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is
now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum.
The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika
of wayward warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power
ties. W., Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick-draw confidence
that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.
Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert
McNamara for deadly incompetence..... the septuagenarian who arrogantly
dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq.
Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who
hadn't sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get
Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military
confidence.
I suspect the history books 50 years from now will find Krauthammer
closer to the truth.
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