The normal turmoil associated with a nascent democracy …

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift has a column today echoing Fred Kaplan’s comments yesterday over at Slate regarding the real import of the Rummy “long, hard slog” memo—the fact that it puts the lie to everything Rumsfeld and other Pollyanish administration voices have been singing about post-war Iraq for the past 18 months or so—but with a little more local color.

Rummy’s revelations are exquisitely timed. Just as Bush is complaining about the national press “filter,” along comes Mr. Filter himself with a sour assessment of the administration’s success in combating terrorism. This is classic Washington. You have to read the entrails. Did Rumsfeld intentionally leak this memo? Was he getting back at the White House for that little reorganization deal they pulled a few weeks ago that seemed to move him aside to make room at the top for Condoleezza Rice?

It’s hard to believe that Rumsfeld would go to these lengths to strike a bureaucratic blow at the White House. “He laid a giant turd on the front doorstep of all the happy talk,” says a Senate Republican aide. If Rumsfeld didn’t intend for this memo to get out, then it was a “revenge of the toes,” the aide speculates. “He stepped on so many toes that this was somebody’s way of getting back at him.”

Turdgrams are back in fashion, it seems, and high time.

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One Response to “The normal turmoil associated with a nascent democracy …”

1. 1
   Megalomania Turdgrams Inc. Says:
   

   hi BTC,
   inaugural congrats from zinya here and thanks for the heads-up to the new and long-awaited, gestated-with-much-nudging "egg" (crows lay eggs, right?) you have wrought here …

   and, for initial ’substance’, a quick copy to you here on point of a posting to slate I just made in kausfiles Orwell and Rumsfeld and foxes, oh my which suggests, to wit:

   I do think Rum’s memo is getting "played" as capitulation a bit much when I think many in the media are (once again) too readily falling for yet another ploy in a neo arsenal artfully masked as pseudo-capitulation when it can be seen to be something of a Trojan horse instead… To wit, recapping the memo’s so-called "key points":

   * "It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

   * "My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves [in the war on terrorism]."

   * "We are having mixed results with [tracking down] Al-Qaida. With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started."

   * "It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution either within DoD or elsewhere."

   * "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

   * "Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions."

   * "How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get’? … Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?"

   From the outset of this bruhaha, my reading has been "Wait a minute. Who’s fooling whom here? Does a fox not always remain a fox and especially when he seems most unfoxy??? the better to beguile [and even with rhetorical cutisms … "behinder" … to look oh-so calculatedly "caught off camera" yeah right…]

   What smacks most loudly in these Rumpoints is their a) evocation of fear masking as admission of failure, all the while b) pointing the misguided noses of the intended eavesdroppers toward a new rationale for ever more secretive, underground subversion of public policy — not once but twice in that short list ("fashion a new institution either within DoD or elsewhere"; Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?")

   I smell ever more rumchenwolfowitzian side-barring of US foreign policy into unregulated corporate welfare-warfare… "new institutions" and "private foundations" dance like sugar plums in Rummy’s pudding as he pulls out his thumb and postures ‘oh what a clever boy am i’…

   I smell a rumrat. Given the timing of this memo in the face of such daily loss of military life, of reported surveys of military morale diving — surely a worst-case scenario alarm for neocon warmaking megalomanias… And so i have to wonder to what extent this list of points seeks to co-opt demoralization and try to convert it into a stoking of ever-more fear of daunting tasks — seemingly capitulating to precisely the left’s predictions which is how you and I read this war’s realities — but for Rum’s own self-embedded world view i smell the cleverness of thinking to re-route this into support for yet more underground machinations and off-line "institutions" and "private foundations" which call to mind the echoes of Reagan era unregulated undergrounds and loose cannons as arms-for-hostages …

   I think it’s precisely in the face of such disingenuous ‘capitulations’ to truth-telling that, with men like Rum & Co., immersed in the multi-national-CEO mind-think of the Searles-Bechtels-Hallibs which literally define the Bush Kitchen-Sink Cabinet, in which the ‘world is their oyster’ underlying premise is never challenged but only buried deeper into newly masked guises… it’s precisely in the face of all this that awareness of Orwellian double-think must put us all the more on our guard.

   zinya

   October 27th, 2003 at 7:12 am