Dec. 18, 2004 #01:  Political Satire/Commentary where satire is always commentary but commentary isn't always satire™ (but we're confident you'll know the difference)  Search PoliSat.Com Home  Tell a friend about PoliSat.Com    Subscribe   Permanent link to this installment in PoliSat.Com's Archives    Google-News list of recent updates    About author, Jim Wrenn.

Firing Rumsfeld-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has become target of demands that he resign or be fired, so it's clearly time for Bush to "fire" Rumsfeld (at his critics).

            The long-knives are out for Donald Rumsfeld.  He's angered too many former and would-be generals for not fighting the "last" war, in which the fabled Powell Doctrine, Overwhelming Force, made sense for many reasons:  First, the goal was to evict Saddam Hussein's half-million-man force from heavily fortified positions in Kuwait.  Second, our use of "overwhelming force" was unlikely to make the Kuwaitis or other allies in the region suspect we had plans to perpetually occupy Kuwait or Iraq.  (There are many other reasons, but most of them are irrelevant to this issues on which this commentary focuses.)

            In planning military operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, if Rumsfeld were to have applied the Powell Doctrine, it would have required far longer to assemble an overwhelming force and arrange the logistics, over-flight rights, land-transportation rights, etc.  The local warlords would have suspected our motives were really no different than those of the Russians in the 1970's.  It would have been far harder to persuade Pakistan and other neighboring countries to cooperate.  The strategy Tommy Franks designed and Rumsfeld approved in Afghanistan was nothing less than brilliant.  With under-whelming force, their plan dislodged the Taliban and disabled al Qaeda from freely using Afghanistan as a bastion.  I remember hearing-- as we began Operation Enduring Freedom-- "expert" after "expert" after "expert" predicting disaster and failure.  Many of them arrogantly asked rhetorically, "The Russians failed with a half-million-man army-- how can we succeed with only a tiny fraction of the forces who necessarily must become dependent on "warlords"?  Yet I also remember that a mere three weeks into Operation Enduring Freedom, the media and Rumsfeld's critics were still predicting disaster and wondering why we hadn't made more progress.   I remember that press conference-- Rumsfeld had to remind the press that the rubble at our 9-11 Ground Zero was "still smoking."  

            I mean no disrespect to former Secretary William Cohen, but if 9-11 were to have happened on his watch, Operation Enduring Freedom would not have occurred.  Not because he cares less for his country than does Rumsfeld-- he's an honorable man who cares just as much as does Rumsfeld-- but because he would have lacked the audacity to approve such a bold plan, and knowing he lacked such audacity would have dissuaded his best generals from formulating such a plan because they had come to understand that none of the political leaders then in power would have approved a bold and right but risky plan.

            For Operation Iraqi Freedom, Franks proposed, and Rumsfeld approved, a similar concept but on a much larger scale, yet everyone knew there to be significant risks in again applying "Overwhelming Force" for at least two reasons:  First, our military was approximately half the size of the military with which we applied "overwhelming force" in the 1991 Persian Gulf War; Second, unlike that war, a half-million troops force (rather than the quarter-million size force Franks assembled to stage, support and project the force into Iraq) would have made Iraqis and neighboring countries suspicious that our real goal was long-term occupation rather than toppling Saddam Hussein and helping a non-barbaric regime replace him.

            What is surprising is not that we encountered surprises but that critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom are surprised that we encountered surprises.  Once warfare commences, surprise almost becomes the rule rather than the exception because adversaries bend their entire strategy, tactics and resources to the narrow purpose of surprising their opponents.  Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's and Franks' strategies out-surprised their adversaries at every turn.  Their plans prevented destruction of the oil fields, the oil-shipping terminals, missiles being launched into Israel, massive refugee problems, massive casualties, and the "thousand Mogadishu's" so confidently predicted by critics as our troops neared Baghdad.  Peter Arnett (here and here) had then only just recently finished explaining to the world how stupid the American military had been and that the invasion was on the verge of collapse.  

            No sensible person wants to minimize the heroism and sacrifice of the more than a thousand combat-related deaths, the thousands of seriously disabling injuries sustained, the pain of the families of those killed or injured, or the raw courage regularly displayed by our troops.  Yet, before Baghdad fell, most of us were expecting the number of deaths to quickly rise into the thousands.  We had not yet seen what we recently saw-- the Fallujah example of brilliant application of all lessons learned the hard way in Somalia.  

            When the war began, no one seriously expected the HumVee to be needed to be a lightly armored vehicle rather than what it had originally been designed to be-- a far more sturdy and versatile version of the World War II Jeep.  More than a year ago, when it became apparent we were beginning to face hit-ant-run urban warfare, the military arranged for the design and production of lightly-armored HumVees and for kits to provide light armor to as many HumVees as possible during the interim.  Given the scale of the problem, the response has been dramatic.  That it has been less than perfect is no grounds for demanding resignation of one of the best Secretaries of Defense we've ever had.

--JimWrenn, Editor at PoliSat.Com.

Installment immediately preceding the one above, go here.

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Questions for Americans:

Shouldn't we be at least as generous in supporting the families of our troops killed or injured while serving our country in Afghanistan, Iraq, in America and throughout the rest of the world as we were for the families of the victims of 9-11?  Here are some suggestions:

*Salute American Heroes*  *Support Fallen Heroes Fund*

Shouldn't we recognize that many, if not most, instances of foreign anti-Americanism in the late 20th Century (like most of the foreign anti-Americanism today) focused reactionary rage against maintenance of, and willingness to use, human-rights-respecting power against forces that oppose liberty and favor the "stability" of the status quo?   See a retrospective on Ronald Reagan.   Shouldn't we recognize that despite arguments to the contrary by devotees of the United Nations that the world remains a yet-to-be-civilized place in which the wise exercise of human-rights-respecting power more than intellectual sophistry can best assure the survival of liberty?

Shouldn't we recognize that "property rights" are among the most fundamental of "human rights" and are therefore vital to the survival of liberty?  See "'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness' versus 'Life, Liberty [and] Property.'"

Questions for secular thinkers:

Shouldn't secular thinkers be at least as respectful towards ordinary people of faith as George Bush is towards ordinary secular thinkers, and shouldn't ordinary secular thinkers repudiate fanatical secular fundamentalists at least as firmly as Bush repudiates fanatical religious fundamentalists?  Shouldn't secular fundamentalists learn to recognize the unscientific nature of their own leaps of faith before throwing stones at unscientific leaps of faith by ordinary people of faith?  See satire/commentary about Secular Fundamentalists and Religious Fanatics.

Shouldn't people professing to be secular thinkers learn to understand the difference between science and political science (i.e., politicized science)?  Shouldn't radical environmentalists learn to understand that their views are little more than modern forms of pantheism?  See Satire/Commentary about Pantheopians.  Shouldn't they learn to objectively and scientifically scrutinize theories such as Global Warming at least as rigorously as they scrutinize "creationism"?  See "Global Warming or Scientific Flatulence?"  See also the commentary on proposed "climate stewardship" legislation and the animated illustration, "Goblins of Globalized 'Warming.'" 

Shouldn't people professing to be secular thinkers learn to understand that what science reveals about human evolution supports, rather than undermines, the sensibility of a rebuttable presumption that monogamous, heterosexual marriage best serves the interests of children notwithstanding the sensibility of recognizing civil unions to accord comparable (but not identical) privileges to mutual-support partnerships?   See  commentary "Evolution versus Revolution" and the animated illustration, "Devolution versus Evolution."

Questions for people of faith:

Shouldn't people with faith that a Deity created free will recognize that compulsory piety would be offensive to such Deity?

Shouldn't people with faith that a Deity created free will recognize that political compromises limiting the power of government to compel conformity with theocratic doctrines over which other people of faith, as well as secular thinkers, can reasonably disagree would not be offensive to such Deity?  See commentary about our Founding Documents, the Constitution and the Creator.

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