Fact finding here is shamelessly stolen from the ever so lovely (and yes, I've seen pictures of her highness) Princess Sparkle Pony. The princess does all my heavy lifting where the current Secretary of State is concerned.
"Yes, I know we have made tactical errors, thousands of them," Secretary of State Rice said in answer to a question over whether lessons had been learnt since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And tactical error number 2,797? Um, I would be guessing, these pants?
Condi later explained her accounting system:
"First of all, I meant it figuratively, not literally. Let me let me be very clear about that. I wasn't sitting around counting," she replied.
Oh thank the good lord! Actually counting up the tactical errors made in Iraq could take for-e-ver! Just ask this guy:
"Ow! Numbers that high make my brain hurt!"
And besides, if you count and then don't like the numbers...
[The results of a 2003] RAND study was that any effective nation-building mission required a 1:50 ratio of peacekeepers to civilians. That was the size of the various Balkan peacekeeping forces. By that standard, between 450,000 and 500,000 U.S. troops would have been required in Iraq.
According to Trainor and Gordon, Bremer passed along a copy of the study to Rumsfeld, who promptly threw it in the garbage.
Way to go, Rummy! Blue Gal does that with her checkbook overdraft statements all the time!
i'm begining to think that washington has been afflicted with a major outbreak of" scarlett ohara flu" the main symptoms:
ReplyDelete"i'll think about it tomrorrow, after all tomorrow is another day!"
combined with childishness and a lot of fiddle dee dee!
as to rummy and condi,i say "frankly my dears, i don't give a damn if you don't like the numbers, wake up and smell the coffee!"
Rummy looks more like Homer Simpson to me. I can just imagine him saying, "DOH!"
ReplyDeleteI prefer to think of that Rumsfeld picture as indicating a moment where he had a sudden realization of his own massive moral failings and utter incompetence, coupled with the thought of just how much blood is on his hands.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the estimable Secretary of State and those ugly pants: do any of the women connected to GW Bush know how to dress? They all seem like their style clock froze around the time of Crockett and Tubbs' heyday in the mid-1980's--you know, the pre-S&L scandal years, when the Bushies helped BCCI off the hook. Before they did stuff like force the US military to fight wars to enrich the Bush family and their political allies.
Garbage?
ReplyDeleteAt DoD, that's known as the circular file.
My father (who is a neo-con) is occasionally quite amusing, in a Rush Limbaugh/Archie Bunker kind of way.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, he said I was for that war until we didn't get the oil. Isn't that why we were over there in the first place?
Why yes, Dad. Yes, we were.