Who is the president?

I've been watching, increasingly disturbingly, how Donald Rumsfeld keeps making foriegn policy pronouncements: Syria's next, Iran better watch it, we'll only accept an unconditional surrender.

Excuse me, but isn't that the President's job? Rumsfeld is detested outside of the US. Even the Brits can't stand him, but every day he's making decisions I had foolishly been taught was the President's domain. Now, I'm not a political scientist, I studied history in college, but I can't for the life of me remember any Secretary of War or Defense who ever made such statements while the President was, oh, alive.

I didn't know that all treatymaking and warmaking authority was in the hands of the Secretary of Defense.

It's also nice to know, as Steve Soto pointed out, that the National Security Advisor has gone ghost during a war. What is she doing, whispering into Bush's ear?

Why is Rumsfeld being allowed to plan the reconstruction of Iraq with only a few deputies? Sure, they're all sniper and car bomb bait, but he's not the junior vice president. We know Cheney lurks in the shadows like a modern day Cardinal Richelieu, quietly running the country for the United States of Halliburton and East Texas, but why is Rumsfeld, of all people, serving as the political voice of the United States?

The PNAC Cabal are the most naive people to run US foriegn policy since Woodrow Wilson sailed to Paris in 1919. The expectation that the INC exiles can run anything in Iraq is as amusing as the Cuban-American Foundation being allowed to run a post-Castro Cuba. I always figured the Angolan vets would meet them at the dock and send them packing. So that was never serious.

But this, this, is ridiculous. Kenan Kamiya hasn't lived in Iraq since I was four. If I were an Iran-Iraq veteran, I couldn't take him seriously. The only people with any credibility are the clerics, mainly because Saddam killed everyone else.

And while the peshmerga seem to be getting a lot of hype, they seem to fighting a lot like the French communists of WWII. They were all into killing Germans to increase the brutality of the Occupation, then hording their allied delivered arms to await the civil war they wanted to kick off when the Germans were defeated. In Italy, the minute Mussolini became a German puppet, the commies exploded out of the woodwork.

The peshmerga are waiting for Baghdad to fall so they can roll into Kirkuk and Mosul with US protection. Of course, the Turks plan to keep rollin', rollin', rollin' south the minute that happens.

What is so frightening about our new spokesman-in-chief is that his threats don't scare anyone. The Iranians and Syrians don't care, the Turks laugh at him, yet he keeps blustering. Rumsfeld is the Chainsaw Al Dunlop of international affairs. Dunlop was a CEO who had the reputation of firing people and cutting costs until he ruined Sunbeam.

Rumsfeld and his deputies may think they're running the world, but the surprise they're going to get is due directly to their naivety about the Middle East. Tilting towards Israel? Are they kidding? Yes, the Shia clerics will agree to that. Just before issuing the fatwa to kill every American and their Iraqi quisling allies. Think car bombs are a problem now? Just wait...........

Steve Gilliard

Posted April 04, 2003 05:47 AM | Comments (158)