Arrogant to the End

By William Fisher

t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Monday 13 November 2006

Well, our Pentagon rock star is gone.

President Bush's encomium to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld after firing him last week was among the most predictable - and utterly forgettable - remarks ever to come out of a White House famous for its predictable and forgettable statements.

The president said the SecDef's leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan "drove Saddam Hussein from power and helped the Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East." On his watch, the president said, "the men and women of our military overthrew two terrorist regimes, liberated some 50 million people, brought justice to the terrorist Zarqawi and scores of senior al Qaeda operatives, and helped stop new terrorist attacks on our people."

Rummy's response was perhaps less predictable and less forgettable. America's misadventure in Iraq, he said, was "a little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century." The war was "not well-known, it was not well-understood, it is complex for people to comprehend."

So it's our fault, right?

The people just don't get it.

The images of carnage we see 24/7 on our TV screens were all produced with Photoshop on Osama bin Laden's laptop.

The "Revolt of the Generals" was a fiction concocted by Harry Reid.

The $20 billion we wasted on Iraqi reconstruction resulted in schools and hospitals and electricity and increased oil output - it's just that the vast leftwing media conspirators aren't bringing us the good news stories (so the Pentagon had better get busy and bribe more journalists to publish more of them).

We're really defeating the Taliban (again).

The people we hold at Guantanamo are "the worst of the worst."

And our near-3000 dead soldiers and marines are only a tiny fraction of the 145,000 troops deployed to the Iraqi killing ground.

How is it we don't understand all this stuff?


READ ENTIRE COLUMN HERE