That Rummy, he's a prince of a guy

Rumsfeld sat for an interview with Larry King this past week (02/03/05).  He was his usual obnoxious self:

Well, I guess, you know, no plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy. We're up against enemies that have brains, and they watch what we do and they change what they're doing to try to take advantage of what we're doing. And of course, we do the same thing.

Gee, Rummy figured out that the Iraqis have brains!  That's why we have expert managers like him in charge of the Pentagon.  And, of course, Rummy didn't have any plan to speak of at all for the occupation.  It didn't survive the beginning of the occupation for the same reason the WMDs didn't - they weren't there to begin with.

King is famous for his softball questions, so of course he didn't follow up on obvious problems like that.

One of the things that didn't go right was we were not able to get the 4th Infantry Division in from the north through Turkey. And because of that, the Sunnis north of Baghdad never really got engaged in the war and an insufficient number were captured and killed in that part of the country. And they didn't really ever experience the full power of the United States military.

And they, in many instances, today are the ones that are fomenting this insurgency that exists in Iraq. So that and the fact that we couldn't get that division in from the north was unfortunate, in my view.

So, it's Turkey's fault.  Plus we didn't kill enough Sunnis.  How did the American press ever turn this guy into some kind of star?

And Rummy steps up to the plate on the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal:

KING: And if he had accepted, no regrets?

RUMSFELD: No. Indeed, no. You know, the -- what was going on in the midnight shift in Abu Ghraib Prison halfway across the world is something that clearly someone in Washington, D.C., can't manage or deal with.

And so I have no regrets. I think that we have a wonderful team of people in the Department of Defense. We have good people. We've made a lot of corrections to make sure that those kinds of things happen -- either don't happen again or are immediately found out and limited and contained.

No regrets.  And, heck, how the [Cheney] am I supposed to know what's goin' on in some night shift somewhere?

Rummy also reassures us about the progress we're making on security:

I feel very good about the fact that we've made such good progress in training and equipping and organizing and mentoring these Iraqi security forces.

If you think about it, on election day, the Iraqi security forces provided the first ring and the second ring of security around 5,000 polling places across a country the size of California.

Sucurity in Iraq is so bad that 5,000 polling places had to have at least two rings of security personnel around them.  And this is good news!

Now, I believe Rummy was speaking from the heart on this one:

Repression works, there's no doubt about that.

This is a great ditzy story here, too:

But the wonderful thing that I saw about Iraq last Sunday was the people went out to some of the polling places, and they stood around, they didn't vote. They watched to see what their neighbors and other people were going to do. And an hour went by and two hours went by. And of course, on the walls it said, "you vote, you die," where the Zarqawi people were threatening them.

But finally some woman, I'm told, over 70 years old, said, I'm going to go in and vote. She walked in to vote and all the other people started coming in. And what those people saw was that despite 35 years of a vicious dictatorship, they still had courage.

This is just the weirdest story, and doesn't amount to much more than a cute anecdote.  Maybe it did happen.  Leave aside that he starts off talking about "some polling" places and then settles on this one story at one polling place.  So let's see.  Security is so bad that they have to have two rings of security around the ballot boxes, people are being threatened with death if they vote, polling places may be the target of suicide bombers or mortar attacks - and people hung around outside shuffling their feet waiting to see if any old ladies were going to vote?  Oh, and it was those foreign terrorists under Zarqawi, you know, outside agitators and stuff, who were making the threats.

Rummy's weird answers could be partially due to beginning senility.  But it's just as likely that it's due to his amazing arrogance that he can do and say whatever he wants with no consequences to himself.