From Holden:
Lefty bloggers have been feeding off of Rummy’s bizarre utterances for nearly four years now. Yesterday’s radio interview in Cincinnati was no exception.
“The postwar plan … was designed to see that they were not able to destroy their oil wells, that they were not able to blow up their bridges, that they did not have massive humanitarian crisis with internally displaced people and refugees and food crisis, and that the war was conducted in a speedy way so that it would not run the risk of destabilizing neighboring countries,” Rumsfeld said when asked to comment on the accusations.
He said all those goals had been accomplished, but he did not mention guerrilla operations among the contingencies the military had planned for, and referred to them as a problem being handled on an ad hoc basis.
“It is a truth that it requires continuously adapting what we’re doing – our tactics and our strategies – to meet the problems on the ground, the security problem on the ground,” Rumsfeld said.
The comments dovetailed with other indications that the administration of President George W. Bush did not anticipate any serious resistance to US troops on the part of Iraqis following the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein.
His comments concerning the administration’s focus on securing Iraq’s oil also dovetailed nicely with the suspicions of the left as well as Little Scottie’s explanation for why U.S. forces did not guard the Iraqi munitions dump at al Qaqa.
Q But after Iraqi Freedom, there were those caches all around, wasn’t the multinational force — who was responsible for keeping track —
MR. McCLELLAN: At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn’t massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur.
We also find out in the same article on Rummy that the CIA wanted to give the Iraqis something other than a certain finger or an RPG to waive at the triumphant invaders:
In the lead-up to the war, the Central Intelligence Agency was reportedly so convinced Iraqis would warmly greet US troops that it proposed smuggling hundreds of small American flags into Iraq ahead of the invasion to give Iraqis something to wave at the soldiers.
The CIA was then planning to capture the event on film and beam it throughout the Arab world, The New York Times reported last week, citing unnamed intelligence officials.
Still, Rumsfeld insisted that “the war plan and the postwar plan were both good ones.”
It’s good to know that after the miserable failure of the Rumsfeld Doctrine our lovable Secretary of Defense hasn’t lost his sense of humor.
Rumsfeld also made light of the controversy over missing Iraqi explosives seized upon by the Democratic campaign.
“Do you remember when the museum – everyone said the museum was looted?” he said when asked to comment on the disappearance of 380 tonnes of conventional high explosives from Al-Qaqaa military base south of Baghdad.
The secretary was referring to reports about massive looting at the Iraqi national museum after the fall of Baghdad that later proved to be exaggerated because many of the artifacts had been hidden by curators.
Ha! The guy’s a riot! Literally.
