Heckuva Job, Rummy

Rumsfeld did a good job according to his own self-assessment. He accepts almost no blame for the mistakes in Iraq in his 800-page autobiography Known and Unknown, copies of which have been and published in excerpt by the New York Times and the Washington Post.Instead, he fingers the US diplomat in charge of postwar Iraq, Paul Bremer, and criticises the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the former National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.When thieves fall out as they say.

John McCain  has criticised Rumsfeld and his self-justifying book by perpetrating the fantasy of a 'victory' in Iraq. He told ABC television: "I respect Secretary Rumsfeld. He and I had a very, very strong difference of opinion about the strategy he was employing in Iraq, which I predicted was doomed to failure. Thank God he was relieved of his duties and we put the surge in. Otherwise we would have had a disastrous defeat in Iraq." He denies he made a mistake in not sending a bigger US force to Iraq in 2003. Senior US commanders were reported at the time to have argued that the force was too small, a view apparently vindicated by the subsequent failure of American forces to stop postwar violence and looting. Rumsfeld concedes that with hindsight, more US troops might have helped stop the looting. "In retrospect there may have been times when more troops could have helped," he writes. But he insists that no formal request for more troops was made by the generals. This might be true for two reasons:

- the generals didn't have a brain cell between them

- the generals were interested primarily in keeping their jobs.

He says Bremer's decisions "inadvertently stoked nationalist resentments and fanned the embers of what would become the Iraqi insurgency".

He is also critical of Powell and Rice over a series of internal squabbles and of George Bush for failing to settle them. He insists that it was Bush who first raised the possibility of intervention in Iraq, two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Bush in his memoir 'Desicion Points'(his spelling) said it was six weeks later, not wishing to appear to have been over anxious for any old excuse to attack Iraq which was singularly uninvolved in 9/11.