Posted on 12/07/2006 6:50:53 AM PST by george76
One day in the next two weeks there will be a departure ceremony at the Pentagon. Flags will fly, bands will play and the liberal media will calumniate.
Should the president choose to add the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the other honors rendered, it's entirely possible that some newsrooms will have to bring in trauma therapists.
The 527 Media will indulge themselves in one last feeding frenzy over the man they love to hate, Donald Rumsfeld.
Mr. Rumsfeld will probably walk out of the Pentagon smiling at the thought of a job well done.
His tenure has been colored by an onslaught of media attacks, but Rumsfeld knows that American history is enriched by men who suffered the same treatment at the hands of the press and were later judged to be some of our greatest leaders.
Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln endured appalling media attacks throughout the Civil War (Lincoln the incompetent baboon, Grant the drunk, Sherman the crazy man)...
a string of lasting accomplishments ranging from bringing ballistic missile defense from theory to reality to transformation of the military from a Cold War garrison force to the flexible forces needed to fight the war we're in.
Add to that the rapid overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam regimes, positioning America to deal with the rise of China...
History will be kinder to Rumsfeld than the daily press, just as it has been to our Civil War leaders, because it will see facts from a greater distance than those who write and broadcast every day can achieve.
Dr. Gates said he was surprised at how much transformation of the military had actually been accomplished...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
I enjoyed lots of the details lower in the article, too.
Thanks!
Ping for later read.
"6 months from now, nearly all freepers will loathe Bob Gates."
I think a good number of us loathe him already. The comments he made that we are "not winning" in Iraq and the fact that he was voted in 98-2 tells me all I need to know. The Dums love and support this guy (Santorum was one to vote against him). He will never be a Rumsfeld and we have lost the leadership of a great and brilliant man as the SecDef.
Department of Defense, news briefing, August 6, 2002
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld: What do I think the U.S. policy ought to be with respect to the settlements in the occupied areas? Question: Yes, sir. Rumsfeld: Former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak made a proposal that was as forthcoming as anyone in the world could ever imagine, and Arafat turned it down. If you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it. If you're giving it to an entity that has some track record, that has a degree of accountability, that has the ability to enforce security that's promised in whatever arrangements are made, it seems to me that's one thing. If you're making a deal and yielding territory to an entity that cannot or will not do that, and there is no question but that the Palestinian Authority [has] been involved with terrorist activities, so that makes it a difficult interlocutor.
My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won. They have offered up, successive prime ministers have offered up various portions of that so-called occupied territory, the West Bank, and at no point has it been agreed upon by the other side.
I suspect it will be, even in my lifetime, that there will be some sort of an entity that will be established. Maybe it will take some Palestinian expatriates coming back into the region and providing the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick. It may be that the neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and others, will have to assist in providing a degree of accountability.
But certainly everyone has to hope and pray that there will be something that could be an effective interlocutor so that they could make a deal.
The settlement issues--it's hard to know whether they're settlements in portions of the real estate that will end up with the entity that you make an arrangement with or Israel. So it seems to me focusing on settlements at the present time misses the point. The real point is to get an effective interlocutor. The real point is to get a condition so that you can have a peace agreement. And those are exactly the things that President [George W.] Bush and Secretary [of State Colin] Powell have been working on, and indeed, working particularly with Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
PING
I still have hope that Gates isn't as stupid as he seems and will learn to deal with the press better.
Taking the ANTI-Rumsfeld posture if you will.
Personally I like the "TELL EM LIKE IT IS" types rather than the "Can't we all get along types." The DIMS always WIN with the latter.
Rummy, we are going to miss you!
Maybe President Bush had a plan here.....
Get Gates in, he's whimpy, so President Bush can get his things done here....
Good plan Mr. President!!!
I have printed this off to send to my WW II vet brother in law and my son too. Something to keep and read and re read.
And no thanks to Powell and his a$$hole buddy Shinseki, we are now paying for their rotten advice.
Obviously, with only 30 something posts...with all of the articles posted re: the Iraq Study Group, this one got missed by a lot of people.
I think if you know of people that have been on some of the flame war threads...you MIGHT want to ping them to this thread...and let them read for themselves.
Just another neocon.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT
..................
That would be General Shinseki, who created the Stryker Combat Teams, and was pushed out because of his off the target insistance that a force of upwards of 200,000 was necessary to stabilize Iraq post invasion. The black berets were silly, and he didn't get along with Rummy, but I'm not so sure our problems in Iraq can be blamed on him.
Hah, I was going to ping you to this.
Shinsekiw wasn't forced out...he had already turned in his resignation..
That "forced out" story is MSM and dem propaganda.
That's true. Personally, I don't see much blame attributable to him. He was probably right about troop levels.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.