Ohiocore

When Donald Rumsfeld received pointed questions about the war recently, in particular about the continued scarcity of body armor and reinforced humvees, it got a lot of play in the press. This is somewhat odd, since the same questions have been posed repeatedly for over a year in different stories and reports. How many times have local papers and stations already run the "Family Raises Money to Buy Body Armor" story?

Apparently what made it remarkable this time around was that the questions were from the same soldiers forced to live with Rumsfeld's decisions. Then, with conisiderable rapidity, the deconstruction of the question/questioner began. It was revealed that Army Spc. Thomas Wilson had practiced the question with an embedded reporter, what may be the first actually beneficial effect of embedded reporting. The intent was to coerce journalists into a psychological identification with military personnel, and subject them to the same command oversight. In many respects, that has been achieved. I'm sure the reporters are better soldiers now. However, on a small scale, it has also made some soldiers better reporters. Lets resample some of the fallout.

Ken Bode (former CNN senior political analyst, and DePauw University's Pulliam professor of journalism) writes for the Indianapolis Star that U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops:

This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.... there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.

Those three recipients are, of course:

One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.

Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?

The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!

It is really that bad... L. Paul Bremer gets the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. I imagine somebody who actually deserves it now would have to turn it down to maintain their dignity.

The Star goes on to report their Senator (IN-D) Evan Bayh's call for Rumsfeld to resign. The criticism is joined my many prominent Republicans:

• Senator John McCain (AZ-R): "no confiedence" in Rumsfeld;
• Senator Chuck Hagel (NE-R): "That soldier, and those men and women there, deserved a far better answer from their secretary of defence than a flippant comment. That might work in a newsroom where you can be cute with the television audience, but not when you're putting these men and women in harm's way, who will be wounded - some, some will be killed."in the Sydney Morning Herald;
• Senator Norm Coleman (MN-R): "serious misgivings" (see the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune);
• William Kristol (former GOP White House aide, Weekly Standard editor, Chairman for the Project for the New American Century): as published in the Washington Post, "surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term."
• Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf (senior commander during Persian Gulf War) issued a "harsh indictment" during an MSNBC Hardball interview:
  

  And I was very, very disappointed—let me put it stronger, I was angry about the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army. I mean, as if he as the secretary of defense didn‘t have anything to do with the Army, if the Army was over there doing it themselves screwing up.

• Thomas Donnelly: As if Bill Kristol wasn't enough, you also have this fellow fellow, as it were, of the American Enterprise Institute (resident fellow) and PNAC (senior fellow) . In a piece for another Rupert Murdoch backed venture, the Daily Standard, he writes "Even longtime supporters and transformation advocates have begun to recognize that Rumsfeld is now a large part of the problem."
• Former Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (MI-R) in the Post:
  Wednesday in Mississippi, Lott said: "I am not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld. I don't think he listens to his uniformed officers." Lott said Rumsfeld should not be forced to resign immediately, but "I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so."

The White House response: "The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a great job, and that's why he asked him to continue serving during this time of war." (Post)

I should point out that some non-conservatives, even moderates oppose the war too. Some actually had problems with Rumsfeld's initial wartime helmsmanship. So the war is a fiasco now, eh? Oh, jeez, we had no idea. If only someone would have warned us, you know, about the entaglements of occupation and the threat of resistance. If only we could have known.

One example, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) in the San Francisco Chronicle (now reduced to a subsection of the SF Gate webpage):

"It's a question of will and priorities. It's hard to escape the conclusion that this is the Army they want -- one whose front-line personnel are forced to wait in line for lifesaving safety equipment (in some cases paying for it out of their own pockets) because a missile defense shield and no-bid Halliburton contracts had to come first...

`Support the troops,' coming from Rumsfeld and company, appears to be nothing more than demagoguery. "

Is it splitsville for Rummy and his PNAC neo-con-job pentagon schiesters? Will public scrutiny have any actual effect? You'll hear Boston Globe op-ed Rumsfeld Must Go ask: "Donald H. Rumsfeld continues as secretary of defense. Why?"

Tune in next time for the stirring conclusion, when we predictably and mind-numbingly discover YET ANOTHER SECRET MILITARY FACILITY FOR TORTURE...