Finally, some common sense from the White House.
Donald Rumsfeld was finally allowed to resign by President Bush yesterday; Robert Gates was introduced as the new nominee for the post.
It's unfortunate that the President waited so long to replace Rumsfeld; it should have happened after the Abu Gharib sex scandal in 2004, when Rumsfeld offered to resign. Bush said "no" then, but he should have said "yes" and put his Secretary of Defense out to pasture.
Why the Administration didn't forsee the insurgency or Iraq becoming a magnet for terrorists and jihaddis was never articulated by Rumsfeld; nor was an effective battle plan to deal with them developed by the Pentagon under Rumsfeld's watch.
Hopefully Gates (or whomever is eventually nominated if it isn't Gates) listens to his generals when they say they need more men and arms over there, or when they say that things are as good as they're going to get and it's time to start drawing back our forces and redeploying them elsewhere in the world. Rumsfeld turned deaf when told it would take an army of 400,000 to secure Iraq properly, and then fired generals who wanted more "boots" to get the job done right.
He was arrogant and didn't listen to his people in uniform.
It was very unfortunate that he wasn't more flexible in maintaining sufficient heavy divisions but allowed them to bleed out in favor of lighter more mobile divisions. Lighter and mobile is good, but not for Iraq. Nor for North Korea. These are plans that are going to need to be rethought by the new SecDef. The military was resistant to those changes to their structure in the first place, but Rumsfeld didn't care.
Bye bye, Don Rumsfeld.
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