Scott's Random Thought For The Day (Doing His Job)



In the face of the growing Iraqi prison scandal Dick Cheny has weighed in on his former boss Donald Rumsfeld. Cheny's words are as follows: "People ought to get off his case and let him do his job."

Funny, I thought the problem here is that Rumsfeld hasn't been doing his job. Rumsfeld lobbied to have sole costodianship of post-war Iraq for the Defense Department at the expense of the State Department. Sadly, it appears that Rumsfeld and his cronies spent more time choreographing the fall of that Saddam statue than setting up a system of responsibility and accountability in the new Iraq jails.

The funniest/saddest part of this scandal was the Bush administration's first response. When the allegations first came to light the U.S. military said, in a statement released on April 30th, that the problems occurred because the soldiers involved hadn't been given proper training in the Geneva Convention. That's kind of like saying that someone has to go to French Culinary Institute in New York City to know enough not to put their hand in boiling water. There are pictures of U.S. soldiers encouraging German Shepherds to repeatedly bite a naked man until he has bloody wounds on both legs. If a soldier thinks the Geneva Convention might allow that, he or she really isn't smart enough to be in our military, thank you very much.

Rumsfeld should be fired. He's incompetent. Yes, he managed to defeat the Iraqi army with nothing but vastly superior technology and overwhelming numbers. Good for him, he achieved something any 10-year old child familiar with Warcraft could have. But even though he was fighting an enemy that didn't really show up, his vision of a "21st Century Military" managed to leave U.S. troops beyond the reach of supply lines, and left our forces badly positioned to take care of the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad. The looting and disorganization that was left in the wake of U.S. military victories only convinced the Iraqis that the U.S. wasn't there to help them.

Now, with this prison scandal, Rumsfeld has finally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. With no WMD in sight, the Bush administration fell back on claiming that we went to war and killed thousands of innocent Iraqis to free them from madman who killed thousands and tortured people in prison. I imagine that such claims were always treated skeptically by most Iraqis, but now that it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that U.S. soldiers were torturing people in the same prison where Saddam did, it's tough to see how we can ever establish a government in Iraq that the people there will see as legitimate.

Posted: Sun - May 9, 2004 at      

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