I have often wondered about why Rumsfeld was so insistent on going to Iraq with far fewer soldiers than even his General staff recommended.He went to the extent of sacking Gen.Eric Shinseki who wanted double the number of soldiers we have there today.
The obvious answers from a Democratic standpoint would be he wanted to keep costs down so he could wage war for a longer period of time,was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to recruit enough bodies for a protracted guerilla war and would even meet with some resistance from the likes of Powell and other Republicans if he asked for a larger force right off the bat.
But, after seeing the impact Cindy Sheehan is having on these cowards, I think the real reason may lie elsewhere.They want to leave a smaller “footprint” on the American people as a whole.A larger force, of course, means larger casualties.It would be more difficult to hide the killed, wounded and maimed if they arrive home in larger numbers.That, in turn, would cause political difficulties at home for the Republicans.Imagine a hundred Cindy Sheehans, tented in front of all the warmongers offices and homes.That would be the nightmare Rumsfeld would be battling even now.
Unfortunately for people like Cindy and countless others, their nightmares have become real, precisely because Rumsfeld made the fatal decision to keep his exposure to the American public low.As a consummate bureaucrat and a great believer in disinformation, Rumsfeld knows that keeping facts from Americans about the war and its consequences was Job 1. A larger force
at the outset would have made that task that much more difficult.This also explains why Bush, Cheney and the entire administration hardly bothers to show up at the funerals of soldiers and would not permit any photographs of the killed or the wounded.
That’s an interesting thesis. I’m not sure you’re correct but it is definitely something to ponder because there’s every possibility you are correct.
What’s more, I like your writing and thinking. Thank you.
Because this administration, anchored as it is by the twin fossils, Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose belief in their own magnificence seems to know no bounds, an examination of the thoughts and actions of these two men will benefit us a great deal.I found the deconstruction of Rumsfeld’s motives in ordering the invasion with few soldiers quite rewarding.I am doing some thinking on Cheney along these lines and hope to post my thoughts soon.Would appreciate your critiquing that too.
I personally think that Rummy felt that if the Iraqi army was defunk and that we would have it easy taking on this project, then why would he need many ppl to do the job??!! :o)
I personally think they did not think things through! I think they are not capable of this.
I personally think that they really believed that things would turn out different than they have. I do not think they were prepared for the alternative. They did not have a plan B or C for that matter.
I think that rummy wants to make our military defunk. I think he wants to make it a military of civilian ppl who will do anything at any cost.
I think rummy does not have a brain to think with in the first place. He is like all the rest. He has been programed and runs on the D battery of which needs recharging from time to time. Rummy is loosing his mind too. I see someone who is heading for the nursing home setting very soon. If not that, maybe the institution of the mentally insane…..:o)
We have a group of incompetent in our government nowadays. They expect their policies to be put into place by those who do have a brain to think with. rummy is a pompous, egotistical old fool.
While I agree with all of the personal traits that you have so ably identified in Rumsfeld,we make a dangerous mistake in thinking he is incompetent or unintelligent. On the contrary, after a lifetime of meandering through Washington’s power structure, he has become adept at gaming our system.He has also been amply rewarded by the revolving door between industry and government, again, not because he is a great wiz at management but because of who he has cultivated as a senior government official.The same thing also holds true for his buddy-in-crime, Cheney.The bottom line is these two are not incompetent at what they do, and that is rigging the system to hide facts from the people and use clandestine methods to fool us.
I always thought it had to do with selling everyone on his wet-dream project to transform the military–which, itself, is the heart of that odious PNAC document. This kind of thing:
All that transformation’s going to make a lot of people way richer than they are already–littering the world with new bases (or whatever they want to call them), building stealthy unmanned craft, pocket-robot gizmos, microbes and shit, etc. And since the PNACers are the ones putting us down this path, they’ll be the ones best situated to profit off it when they leave the government (or before they leave, in certain cases).
Rumsfeld is using Iraq (ineptly, I don’t hesitate to add) to prove that this sort of transformation is a great idea. And the whole point of transformation is to make money.
I am sure that you are right about the process of Transformation that the PNAC document touts so heavily.And, given Rumsfeld’s massive ego, he is a believer in that concept.But, in the immediate context of Iraq, his strategic objectives needed to ensure that the American public did not become too concerned about the war’s human costs and he made the calculation, correctly, I think, that keeping the number of soldiers to an absolute minimum and keeping a tight lid on information about the casualties, would make it politically impossible for people like Cindy Sheehan to arise their voices against his dirty war.Even with this approach, his game is becoming apparent and he is on the run from an angry mother.Imagine what would have happened if he had deployed twice the number of soldiers and we had casualties of 100 or more dead soldiers each month!
In times like these we need a William Shirer to expose the madness of our own version of megalomania.