Rummy responds
In today's New York Times Rumsfeld responded to his detractors and critics. His response is largely to say publicly that he is ignoring the criticism and going on with his job:
So I'm here at the Pentagon doing my job, working on transformation and seeing that we manage the force in a successful way, and working on things involving Iraq
He is however, also going to have a closed-door meeting with retired officers and civilian analysts today to assess the current situation in Iraq, and I presume to stop some of the political bleeding from the recent public calls for his resignation.
Alas, Rumsfeld can't open his mouth without something interesting coming out:
if every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War and we wouldn't have been involved in World War I or II, and if we had, we would have failed, and our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel."
To paraphrase: critics are weak and stupid, and bad for your health. He went on:
That said, if we had only listened to the critics in the 1960's and stayed out of Vietnam, we could have saved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives and would very likely have avoided the inflation crisis of the 1970's. At the very least, our economy would have been far better able to withstand the oil shocks of the early 70's. Oh, and we probably wouldn't have sold our entire economic engine out to the defense industry and we'd still be making useful things that the world's consumers would want to buy.
Okay, I made that last one up.
