Iraq War: Up a creek, no paddle available

Joe Conason takes a look at the implications of the torture revelations for the US war in Iraq: Rumsfeld's ruinous deceptions Salon.com 05/12/04.

Having found no weapons of mass destruction, not even traces of them, we were down to the justification of stopping the human rights abuses under Saddam's regime and bringing the Iraqis a better life as a justification for the war.  Now, he says: "At a moment of terrible shame for the United States, the credibility squandered by the White House in the months leading up to the war has left the nation morally defenseless before the world."

How and when American troops should be extricated from Iraq remains a matter for intense debate. It is not at all clear that a precipitous pullout, leaving a torn nation to the mercies of warlords and armed mullahs, would serve the interests of Iraqis, Americans or the rest of the world. But what becomes clearer with each day is that we are in deep trouble -- and that the Bush administration possesses neither the will nor the ability to prevent the worst consequences of a failed policy. They have given Osama bin Laden a victory that he could never have won for himself.

And Conason gives a brief and extremely accurate description of Rummy, the man Dick Cheney says is the best Secretary of Defense the US has ever had.

Indeed, Rumsfeld personifies the ruinous combination of deception, arrogance and incompetence that has so badly damaged the war effort from the very beginning. His role has been so ruinous, in fact, that even some of the most enthusiastically hawkish pundits, such as George Will and Andrew Sullivan, are belatedly coming to recognize that utopian dreams of democratic imperialism have turned into a nightmare of colonial occupation. But the secretary of defense reflects nothing more or less than the president's policies and attitudes, which is why he still has his position.

In reality, even Jefferson Davis was a better Secretary of War than Rummy.  Davis served as US Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce.