Krauthammer vs. Dowd on Rumsfeld
RCP Blog
Charles Krauthammer on Rumsfeld's legacy from last night roundtable on Special Report with Brit Hume:
The person who had the stature and experience to go after the entrenched bureaucracy of the military and to want to change it to be more light and adaptable, and that is a process that will be remembered as a very big positive.
Secondly, he's the man who gave us these amazingly swift victories to defeat and destroy enemy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq with an economy and a swiftness nobody would ever have expected.
Remember also, we've gone five years without a terrorist attack. And all of this is his legacy. Of course, obviously, is the stalemate in Iraq, the decisions that were made early on, that were hard decisions, some of them in retrospect were not right. But Iraq is still in play and those who say his legacy is written on Iraq, I think are wrong. I think we're going to see how it turns out.
Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times.
James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum.
The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of wayward warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties. W., Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick-draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.
Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence..... the septuagenarian who arrogantly dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq.
Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who hadn't sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military confidence.
Let's just say I suspect the history books 50 years from now will find Krauthammer closer to the truth.
realclearpolitics.com |
