Sake White

CDR Salamander has up a very enlightening link about Rumsfield’s tenure as DOD chief.

Recommended reading for those who want to review the war effort for the real details instead of the Main Sewer Media’s fabricated ones.

Few know that in early 2003 – a month or more before the Iraq invasion – President Bush was presented with two plans for post-war Iraq. The first, written by CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided for a long occupation of Iraq and the nation-building that the president renounced in his 2000 campaign. The second, a Pentagon plan authored by Rumsfeld’s team, provided for the establishment of a provisional government before the invasion and American withdrawal within months of Saddam’s overthrow. The president, convinced by Powell that “if you break it, you own it”, chose the Powell-Tenet plan and ordered Rumsfeld to carry it out.

When Baghdad fell, after the brief tenure of Gen. Jay Garner, the president appointed L. Paul Bremer III to govern Iraq under Rumsfeld’s direction. But Bremer proved to be a loose cannon, endlessly circling around from Powell to Rice to the president to get permission to do whatever Rumsfeld didn’t agree with. One Pentagon official involved closely told me Bremer’s tenure was disastrous because of his continuing reliance on the group surrounding Adnan Pachachi, an old-time Sunni whose persuasion of Bremer to leave Sunni militants alone was one of the principal reasons the Sunni insurgency was able to gain strength. Bremer’s decisions to disband the Iraqi army and delay the outlay of reconstruction funds alienated Iraqis almost completely. At about that time, the media began contriving the myths of Rumsfeld and Iraq.

All of those myths combined, in the minds of some defeated Republicans, to blame Mr. Rumsfeld for the election debacle of November. But that overlooks the facts presented by the Zogby poll in late October that showed 49% of Americans wanted the president to retain Rumsfeld, against 42% who wanted him gone. When that poll was taken, the president’s job approval numbers were about ten points lower than Rumsfeld’s “stay or go” polls.