Rumsfeld goes down

[tongodeon]

The White house is finally replacing Rumsfeld, who (for those keeping score) already attempted to resign twice. What's most interesting to me is who he's being replaced with: former CIA director Robert Gates

Comments

[arian1]

Yes, it is an interesting shift. I listened to the entirety of Bush's press conference on NPR and I noticed something. The swagger was not so swaggering. He sounded a bit humbled and more than a little in realization that the old thinking needed to go. One thing about Bush, he does show those self-preservation skills pretty well when it's on the line. I think knowing that the Congress wasn't going to stamp Rumsfeld's directives as they were made him ineffective and at the same time a head the Democrats would use to leverage on. So yeah, we'll see what happens. Gates will still have to make some inroads back at the company and mend more than a few fences.

It will be interesting.

[mad_and_crazy]

Assuming that there are investigations. Will there be investigations?

Should Congress Pre-Empt A Criminal Trial???

[drieuxster]

some may be old enough to remember the fiasco of the Iran/Contra affair, and how ultimately most of the convictions were thrown out because the prosecution could not establish that it's evidence was derived independent of the immunity granted testimony.

so do americans really want the democrats to flub this one up as well? simply for domestic political gamesmanship???

[cactusthesaint]

Rumsfeld immediately announced a series of sweeping reviews intended to plot the transformation of the U.S. military into a lighter, more nimble force. These studies, led by Pentagon analyst Andrew Marshall, drew widespread resistance from the military services and members of Congress, who worried that Rumsfeld would cancel pet projects. (Eventually, he succeeded in killing the Army's Crusader howitzer and its Comanche armed scout helicopter.) --wikipedia

That's what I was talking about earlier, and is probably the only good thing Rumsfeld did. (Although I did kind of like the Comanche, but I think that's because I was an AirWolf fan as a kid. Stealth helicopters are cool!)

The ongoing challenge....

[drieuxster]

is whether americans are willing to get past this whole cold war fiasco

Re: The ongoing challenge....

[tongodeon]

The "lighter, nimbler force" directive also seems pretty optimistically reminiscent of the "mouseketeers who will majikally wave a wand and make the world safe for everyone with just one more coup...." that you brought up below. It seems pretty well repudiated by Iraq, where our light and nimble force can defeat any enemy in that country until we nimbly scamper off to defeat ANOTHER enemy and more enemies come back.

Re: The ongoing challenge....

[drieuxster]

yes, no, and sorta

[ikkyu2]

GHW Bush was appointed head of the CIA for a while, you know.

[mmcirvin]

Oh yes, which leads to all sorts of involved Oedipal speculation about Dubya.

[tongodeon]

Yes, and he spent conservatively and chose not to occupy Iraq. That's why I voted for him the second time. (I wasn't old enough to vote for him the first time.)

True, he was dirty, but was he a tenth as dirty as Rumsfeld? Did he make the mistakes that Rumsfeld made when he invaded Iraq? I don't think so. HW would be an improvement, and hopefully Robert Gates will be too.

[ikkyu2]

Actually, it's always puzzled me that GW would kick the CIA around like his own private football, when HW presumably would have had enough experience to advise him about a more "prudent" way to go about it. I wonder how much of what we saw over the past few years was HW-driven and how much was simply GW ignoring the old man.

Gates is a rarity, a DCI who came up through the ranks as a career analyst and then went political. (HW was awarded the job after being Ambassador to the UN; it may have been a plum in lieu of not getting the VP nom for '76.) It'll be interesting to see what Gates does.

[mmcirvin]

Well, it at least takes care of one scenario people have been muttering about: the White House naming Joe Lieberman as SecDef so that the governor can name a Republican as his replacement, guaranteeing that the Senate stays under Republican control regardless of the Virginia and Montana races. Of course, Lieberman could still just switch parties.

[creepyanonymous]

Lieberman has no incentive to switch parties. He gets a lot of attention as a Democrat because he's all about "bipartisanship"; if he switches parties, he loses that, and isn't any more noteworthy than Olympia Snowe.

[cucumberseed]

Exactly. Also, I think there is a good possibility he could have caught a whole lot of hell on the way to confirmation. Lieberman's a good friend of the Administration, but not really of the Republicans, who, I don't think, would have supported him enough to get him by what we can assume, given the stakes, would be an all-out Democratic push to block that nomination. Really, he has no incentive to switch out of the senate for a cabinet position, either, especially in the last 2 years of an administration. He's got a much sweeter deal where my fellow nutmeggers and I failed to dislodge him. Sorry about that, everyone.

[mmcirvin]

He could become a sort of Jim Jeffords or Zell Miller figure, revered by the base of his new party for his willingness to bash the other guys in a conversion narrative.