Today, in a Slate article, Fred Kaplan puts a spin on the Rumsfeld memo that I hadn't thought about. He points out the parallels to internal concerns that were not being made public during Vietnam, when Robert McNamara was Secretary fo Defense under LBJ, to concerns that we can see in yesterday's leaked memo. (Read about The Pentagon Papers here.)
Kaplan also sums up the Rumsfeld memo in a rather concise fashion, "we're losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don't know how to measure winning or losing, we don't have a plan for winning it, we don't know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so." Yea, it is simplified, but it is almost exactly what Rumsfeld said. Read the memo.
Kaplan also points out how the leaked memo really undermines the Bush administration's PR blitz of the last few weeks. My personal favorite has been the commerce secretary, Don Evans. Evans has the face of a car salesman, smile painted firmly across his nicely tanned mug. You get the feeling that he really wants to believe that things are going well, but he oversells it so badly, that you would be a moron not to see he is selling you an 1982 AMC Pacer. I saw Evans last week on CNN, and he was smiling so big that I literally feared he might swallow his own face. His optimism was so over-the-top, I think it went something like this(don't hold me to this): I ran across many Iraqi's when I was over there, and from what I heard on the news, I thought they all would kill me, but they started dancing, and I feared it was some kind of bizarre muslim sacrificial-type ritual. Then they brought out some pretty girls and some clowns. So, I started dancing, too. Before I knew it we were all dancing, and then I swear the whole country broke out into song. We sang and dance and laughed all night. So, as you can see I am shocked to see that the media doesn't report all this glorious singing and dancing. What about all the clowns? I havn't seen one clown yet on CNN, and when I was over there, I swear, I saw at least a thousand clowns, and besides the group of 55 that were shot in that Volkswagon at an American checkpoint, they have all been safe and happy."
Actually Evans did go to Iraq, and though he was on all the networks praising the adminstraion for all of its good work, Kaplan reports that Evans may have not truly been able to assess the way things were going. "How long had Evans been in Iraq? About 24 hours. Where did he sleep that night? In Kuwait." So, Iraq was in such great shape that he stayed one day, and then travelled to Kuwait to sleep safely away from the "long, hard slog" that is our war.