Is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld interfering too much in imposing strategy and logistics on his military experts, rather than simply imposing overall policy?
A very interesting article in yesterday's Washington Post, concerning an article to appear in the Monday 7 April issue of 'New Yorker' magazine. A couple of quotes, to give a flavour:
"He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the article quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon planner as saying. "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."
If the contention of this article has substance, I do wonder if it's all a part of the rivalry said to exist between the 'hawks' Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice and the more moderate elements in the US administration, for example Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former serving army officer who is known to be cautious in his approach and who is said to prefer to go in with over-whelming force, or not at all.
I hope that this internal jostling is not going to get in the way of achieving the over-riding objective - the removal of Saddam Hussein and his odious Ba'athist regime and its replacement in due course by a somewhat more representative, and hopefully decent (in all the senses of that word), government in Iraq.
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