I think that they hate us for not making clear that “their” lives matter.
Read this clip in the Sunday Telegraph that only compounds the damage done by prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. It looks like private defense contractors under contract with the United States government have serial killers out just randomly shooting people.
Who is to blame for this?
It has always been under Donald Rumsfeld that these abuses have occurred. He should have been forced to resign two years ago, but he still stands strong — giving his “aw shucks, it’s not my fault” responses to these disasters.
Over the weekend, Tim Russert pushed Senator John Warner on the subject of battalion commanders’ alleged requests for more troops to accomplish their missions in Iraq. Warner would not comment on what was said in a private meeting with these field commanders, but word leaked out that nearly all field commanders have been requesting more troops — and made a major plea for such troops in August 2005.
Rumsfeld continues to say that he has not been asked by his commanding officers for more troops and would give them whatever they need. This is clearly a political optics game. Rumsfeld is lying and knows that U.S. commanders on the ground do not believe that they have the troop levels to do the job being requested — and that their commanders in the Pentagon are not asking for more troops because Rumsfeld does not want them to.
Rumsfeld is destroying the U.S. military, its morale, and its nuts-and-bolts operations.
Because of Abu Ghraib, this Aegis Defense video, and many other incidents that have exposed immoral behavior by American operatives engaged in what appears to average Iraqis to be an occupation and not a liberation — our soldiers cannot do much more than flounder in current circumstances. To really get hold of Iraq again would take, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, 500,000 troops — four times what we have currently deployed.
The situation is a genuiune mess — where greater deployments are no longer politically acceptable, and about which Rumsfeld has been lying anyway. A gradual withdrawal — which some are calling a “strategic redeployment” of Iraq-based U.S. troops — will not help matters unless the mission of those forces left behind is also radically decreased.
We need new management at the Pentagon and have needed such for a very long time — but the morale of the United States as a nation is being sacrificed because of the massive ego and constant missteps of Donald Rumsfeld.
Fire him.
— Steve Clemons
