Do you believe that Donald Rumsfeld is the one of the worst Defense Secretaries our country has ever had?
Danale
2007/02/20 06:43:00
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32 votes
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63% | ||
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12 votes
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24% | ||
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7 votes
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14% | ||
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Monday the war in Iraq has been mismanaged for years and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be remembered as one of the worst in history.
We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement — that's the kindest word I can give you — of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war," the Arizona senator told an overflow crowd of more than 800 at a retirement community near Hilton Head Island, S.C. "The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously."
Top Opinion
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Yes
+3I am actually shocked he is still on the loose. He, along with Bush and Cheney, should have been brought to The Hague.
little mark
To start a war built on lies, told to the American people and congress is beyond criminal and all these guys knew they were lying to us. They are now finding out in England that the Iraq war was planned by Bush two years before we started it. Many communications between Bush and Tony Blair show Bush prompting Blair to join him after Bush put on his lies. Rumsfeld and the others are dispicable. Robert Mcnamara was no prize either.
When I read up on WWII or talk to vetereans and people who lived through WWII they tell how we didn't jump right into that war. The president waited, watched, and had his best people on top of what was going on, as he didn't want to send men offf to die unless it was an absolute necessity..That is exactly what a good president should always do.. After all it is young lives that you destroy when choose to go to war for selfish reasons. Tell a soldier "Saddam insulted my daddy," or "I want to show my daddy that I am a warmonger" from a man who repeatedly refused to go to Vietnam as did Cheny and I know none are pleased..
Our soldiers willingly go to fight when our president tells them they must for the safety of our families and way of life and these brave people should not die and be maimed because a group of scoundrels want to be big shots.
Donald Rumsfeld had the McNamara history to guide him in much of what he did but either chose to ignore it or paid no attention. It is oh so true that to not remember history, makes us doomed to repeat it.
The following is an explanation, far better than I can give, of what a documentary,
"The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" directed by Errol Morris, had to say about McNamara and is mostly based upon admissions made by McNamara himself.
"This documentary consisted mostly of interviews with Robert McNamara and archival footage. It went on to win the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The particular structure of this personal account is accomplished with the cha...
Donald Rumsfeld had the McNamara history to guide him in much of what he did but either chose to ignore it or paid no attention. It is oh so true that to not remember history, makes us doomed to repeat it.
The following is an explanation, far better than I can give, of what a documentary,
"The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" directed by Errol Morris, had to say about McNamara and is mostly based upon admissions made by McNamara himself.
"This documentary consisted mostly of interviews with Robert McNamara and archival footage. It went on to win the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The particular structure of this personal account is accomplished with the characteristics of an intimate dialogue. As McNamara explains, it is a process of examining the experiences of his long and controversial period as the United States Secretary of Defense, as well as other periods of his personal and public life. In this documentary he referred to the Vietnam war and he said, "None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
This reasoning was viable then and it should have been viable for Donald Rumsfeld. But a question I would ask, and have never had answered, was "is Donald Rumsfeld as bad as he seemed or was he doing only as he was directed"? Did he give bad advice to President Bush or was he given it. Considering his position however his voice should have been the voice of reason and he chose not to be.
In every war there are mistakes made...can't avoid that. But at the end of the day, our military leadership is doing a fine job. In the opinion of another man.
Iraq is and was a total disaster..The word from those over there has been that in the opinion of experts and some military personnel is that when we leave the country will return to a dictatorship under the dictators running for office right now.
Many Iraqians when asked have said they woudl rather have Saddam running the country then those who are now in charge..Now that is scary and I hope they are wrong but it looks as though Iraq, a country we had no business in going to war with will return in worse shape than it was.
No WMD, Saddam was not involved in 9/11 as Bush claimed. And to find out Bush started planning the Iraq 2 years before he sent our military is dispicable.
NOT so Hot:
Yikes unless that's not his thumb between those pages?
He can only do what congress allows- and dems have NEVER allowed the soldiers to WIN.
Only do what congress allows? The Bush regime along with Rumsfeld played the American people and congress like a fine violin with false evidence of WMD, and so called evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11. Yet when confronted before leaving office Bush shrugged and said "It didn't matter if none of this was true we still needed to go to work with Iraq..Just as Bush said "He could cared less where and what Bin Laden was doing before leaving office..
Of course the Bush regime didn't care as it wasn't their families and friends going off to war to die or be maimed.
He's right up there with Blitzkreg and Kamakazi!!!
Anyone involved in starting the Vietnam war also belongs in Hell. My husband was one of Westmorelands boys as General Westmoreland liked to call them. Older brother, family members, and friends fought in that war and many are now dying from Agent Orange, and some that served with my husband have a form of parkinson's from agent orange so I see them still dying as a result of the Vietnam war.
Why some are so eager to rush off to wars of their own making is beyond me and especially those like the two little frightened frightened rabbits, Bush and Chenny whom were to frightened to go and bought their way out of Vietnam..Chenney actually said "He was to valuable of a person to be sent to Vietnam. We need to send these eager Beaver's to fight first. Bet there would be a heck of a lot less 'Wars of chose."
Why did Bush so like communist China that he overlooks their ways yet started a phony war against Iraq.
You need to listen to what the average Iraqian is saying about the regime coming in. These people know more about their own government and many are saying things are worse for them now then under Saddam and once the Americans are gone (and we will be soon as our troops are confined to bases and certain areas right now as per the Iraq government) things will return not only to the old way but will be even worse.
That is so very sad.
Robert McNamara hands-down. Those who doubt this should look into his "Project 100,000" social experiment (which is shamefully under-reported) with our military. See op-ed piece by Kelly Greenhill of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government:
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ksgnews/Features/opeds/021...
Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara's scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country's "subterranean poor"--people who would otherwise be rejected. Using a variety of "educational and medical techniques," the Pentagon would "salvage" these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits--known as New Standards Men--would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to "reverse the downward spiral of human decay." Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia. *** END QUOTE *** Some 150,000 NSM were inducted by 1968. The experiment proved not just foolish but deadly: *** QUOTE *** A Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire. But Project 100,000 recruits fared poorly outside combat as well. . . . Research conducted in the late 1980's revealed that across the services Project 100,000 recruits were reassigned at rates up to 11 times greater than their peers. Likewise, 9 percent to 22 percent of these men required remedial training, as compared to only one to three percent of their higher-category counterparts in the Army, Air Force and Navy.