The Wit & Wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld

Good ol' Rummy. You can always count on him to make a flippant comment that's so incredibly, stupidly callous that it leaves you gasping - and he certainly didn't let us (or our Baghdad-bound troops) down while in Kuwait today:

Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.

Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.

"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson said after asking again.

Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible.

And, the defense chief added, armor is not always a savior in the kind of combat U.S. troops face in Iraq, where the insurgents' weapon of choice is the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device that has killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops since the summer of 2003.

"You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up," Rumsfeld said.

A real morale booster, huh... hope he at least shared some of his fighting techniques with 'em.


Of course he's almost as much fun in his full-on liar mode:


Certainly, the intelligence we received did not lay out the kind of a postwar environment that we’d be in.
DOD Link 11/30/04

"But I don’t think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you’d be in the degree of insurgency you’re in today and resistance on the part of a mixture of Baathists and pro-dictatorship, pro-Saddam people, mixed in with some foreign terrorists and extremists."
12/6/04

MATTHEWS: You knew the difficulties of occupation.

RUMSFELD: Yes.

MATTHEWS: The chance that we’d have to face the Ba’athist remnants, the difficulties between these different groups, the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds. You knew all that?

RUMSFELD: And the risk of ethnic cleansing.
- Hardball, 4/29/04

I mean, the senior military advisors, Dick Myers and Pete Pace, the battlefield commanders, Tom Franks, General Abizaid, General Casey, General Metz, every instance they have had exactly the number of troops they’ve asked for.
12/2/04

It is true that [Army Chief of Staff] Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 25, 2003 that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required for an occupation of Iraq.
- Factcheck.org

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.
- Knight Ridder

We know where they [WMD's] are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.
3/30/03

I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.
5/4/03


Ya just gotta love him, don'tcha?