Day By Day© by Chris Muir.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Fair and Balanced
The [Abu Ghraib] scandal is widening, with more allegations coming to light. Moreover, the abuse of these prisoners is not the only damaging error that has been made and it forms part of a culture of extra-legal behaviour that has been set at the highest level. Responsibility for what has occurred needs to be taken—and to be seen to be taken—at the highest level too. It is plain what that means. The secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, should resign. And if he won't resign, Mr Bush should fire him.The Economist, December 9, 2004, in an editorial headlined Calls for the secretary-general to resign over the oil-for-food scandal are premature:
That there was a scandal is not in question. . . .This is a vast scam: its details must be uncovered and the guilty punished. But the details have not yet been uncovered, no charge has been proven, and no official has been convicted of corruption, though some may yet be.Any questions?
Shouldn't the man at the top go anyway? Mr Annan is not the boss of a firm or president of a country, at whose desk the buck must automatically stop. He is the servant of his political masters. This general rule applied with a particular vengeance in the oil-for-food programme. The UN set up a secretariat to manage the programme, but the members of the Security Council maintained ultimate control. Every contract was scrutinised by a committee of its 15 members. It was not Mr Annan's fault that this committee soon became deadlocked.
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At the UN, "members of the Security Council maintained ultimate control." The US is part of the Security Council; Kofi Annan is not part of the Defense Department. There's a rational case to be made that Rumsfeld and/or Annan should go, but the Economist isn't being hypocritical here.
By 
dpmacmanus, at
11:17 AM
Chuck Hagel: Shill for the Economist
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0412/12/le.01.html
I don't like the way [Rumsfeld] has done some things. I think they have been irresponsible. I don't like the way we went into Iraq. We didn't go into Iraq with enough troops. He's dismissed his general officers. He's dismissed all outside influence. He's dismissed outside counsel and advice. And he's dismissed a lot of inside counsel and advice from men and women who have been in military uniforms for 25 and 30 years.
One of the reasons we've got this problem, Wolf, in my opinion, is that we were unprepared for what we were going to face, what we are facing, in a post-Saddam Iraq. And this is just one more manifestation of the problem.
Listen, when I talk to these young troops that come back from Nebraska, National Guard Reserves, active duty, and I sit down with them alone in a room and no one there, no cameras, I ask them -- I was hearing some of these same things over the last year: not the right kind of weaponry, personal body armor they didn't have. They didn't have armor for their vehicles.
By dpmacmanus, at
11:32 AM
Yeah, and neither was Rumsfeld's son caught with his hand in the cookie jar. . .
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