Rumsfeld At Center of Iraq Criticism

The Administration has positioned Iraq as a central issue in Tuesday's elections. And as Americans head to the polls (if they haven't already voted) , they're being treated to a unusual show of public discord between the professional military and its civilian oversight.

On Saturday, the Army Times published a hard-hitting editorial calling for President Bush to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Last week someone from Central Command leaked a briefing slide that shows how perilous conditions are in Iraq. Adding salt to the wound: neoconservatives from Richard Perle to Kenneth Alderman "tell all" to Vanity Fair, placing the blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq squarely on the shoulders of the President.

Before the US invaded Iraq, the Administration insisted that the goal was to establish a democracy and self-rule, including full responsibility for the country's police and miltary. This plan has been stymied, and pronouncements of imminent hand-over come ... and then go, unfulfilled. Now, according to the Army Times, "American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don’t show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves."

The Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times are running the same editorial. The four papers are published by a subsidiary of Gannett, which owns USA Today. (tip)

This editorial comes on the heels of a bad week for the Administration. Someone in the US Central Command in Iraq gave the New York Times a slide from an 18 October classified briefing. The slide, entitled "Iraq: Indications and Warnings of Civil Conflict," shows that those with feet on the ground believe the civil conflict continues to worsen in Iraq.

In addition, the slide says: "Urban areas experiencing 'ethnic cleansing' campaigns to consolidate control ... violence at all-time high, spreading geographically."

Of course, none of this is "news" to people who regularly read foreign media and Iraqi blogs.

Vanity Fair
And then there's the Vanity Fair teaser. The full story runs in the January issue, which will hit newstands in December.

Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

In the NRO, Perle rails at Vanity Fair, insisting that he had been "promised" that his remarks would not be published before the election. After all, these unvarnished opinions might "influence the public debate."

Frank Gaffney, also included in the teaser, calls VF "venal" and says that publishing the excerpts was "partisan" and a "political dirty [trick]."

Eliott Cohen, on the other hand:

Being neither Republican nor Democrat, and thinking the government's conduct of the Iraq war an entirely appropriate subject of political debate I do not think anyone should have kept mum in an interview of this kind until an election had passed. That said, I had assumed that the interview would not be published until January, and find the timing of this release of excerpts tendentious, to say the least.

What did VF quote Cohen as saying? Withdrawal timetable, "a mess," and de-stablization:

I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess... I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.

So there you have it. The neocons criticize the workings of the Administration, the management of the war effort. A slide that points to growing chaos at a time that the official word is the opposite.

It's no wonder, then, that the Army Times closes with this:

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Added: In January, a Military Times poll showed that support for President Bush's policy in Iraq dropped nine points from 2004 to 2005 and approval of his overall performance had dropped 11 points.

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