Up For Honors
Rumsfeld surfaces, to collect The Claremont Institute’s “Statemanship” award.
Yochi Dreazen the Wall Street Journal Online notes that Rumsfeld’s statesmanship included jabs about “Old Europe” and in response to the looting of Baghdad, “Freedom is messy.” Those were in fact great examples of Rumsfeld’s blunt and refreshing form of statesmanship, dispensing with diplomatic niceties in time of war.
Dreazen cites the think tank’s mission, “to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life” and support ”limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life, and maintains a strong defense.” Here we run into a bit of a problem. It’s not Rumsfeld’s bold agenda to engage with enemies that had been allowed to attack us with impunity for two decades and posed threats going forward. It’s his insistence on doing so with half an army, the consequences of which we’ll be dealing with for some time to come. The fall of 2001, when Americans wanted to know what they could do and Congress would have written a blank check, was the time to tell Americans, “We need to double the size of the Army. We’re going to be using it.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:44 am on Friday, May 4, 2007
5 Responses to “Up For Honors”
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May 4th, 2007 at 10:18 am
A good many people were saying that we needed a bigger Army when we got involved in Kosovo. I figured it was a slam dunk that the new Bush administration would increase the size of the force, and was consistently stunned by Rummy’s refusal to do so. I understand the whole “transformation” line (flowing from the “revolution in military affairs” that has been occuring over the past 10-15 years), but I couldn’t believe that Rummy would be so dense to as to ignore the very simple military doctrine of “better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it”.
“Going to war with the Army you’ve got” is fine at the start of the war, but it doesn’t hold water more than three years into the fighting.
May 4th, 2007 at 11:16 am
I remember sitting with my jaw on the ground, watching another round of base closings right after we went into Afghanistan. America has a long history of cutting her forces to the bone when not at war, but to continue to do so when we’ve just gone to war was the first little alarm in my head warning me that all was not right. Unfortunately, those alarms have only gotten louder and more insistent as time has gone on, to the point where that’s all there is now.
May 4th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
CavMedic,
I’m pretty sure we should put the phrase “slam dunk” into the back warehouse, the place where we put “o.j.,” when it used to mean orange juice.
May 4th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
$600 billion a year to fight a few thousand peasants…and now we need to spend even more?
What a racket.
May 6th, 2007 at 2:48 am
It’s more than a few thousand peasants, alphie! Bush, Cheney, and Haliburton are at war WITH THE WORLD. You, me, and the rest of the masses. Iraq is just a small part of the war.
WE THE PEOPLE are standing up to the American Empire! Emperor Chimpy will not gain one more foot of unYankee soil, he will not take one more gallon of oil from Canada, not one more dollar from the hands of starving Zimbabwean children! McDonalds will sell no more fattening food to undeserving non-Yanks! Wal-Mart shall keep their evil clutches out of Europe!
It’s not a few thousand, alphie! THERE AER MILLIONS OF US!!!! MILLIONS!!!!
The evil Emperor Chimpy shall not succeed in conquering the world!
But it’s good to see you fighting the good fight, alphie. Speaking truth to power is our main weapon in this battle for justice.