"You can't always get what you want."

A good assessment the Rumsfeld Question by David Ingatius:

The Bush administration in recent weeks has -- very much in secret -- begun to ask itself the tough questions: Is the Iraq strategy working? Can we achieve our goals with the tools we have? If not, how do we adjust them so that they fit? One top-level policymaker tried to explain the mood a few days ago by quoting the Rolling Stones: "You can't always get what you want."

Rumsfeld long ago became the symbol for a war he began to doubt at least three years ago when he wrote his famous memo predicting that Iraq would be a "long, hard slog." That illustrated the best of Rumsfeld's intellectual style: He asked whether U.S. tactics were creating new terrorists faster than we were killing the existing ones and mused: "Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?"..

Rumsfeld's gift was his brilliance and intellectual toughness. He kept his head up even as the war in Iraq went from bad to awful. In that, he was a harder man even than one of his predecessors, Robert McNamara, who in his final year running the Vietnam War began to crack privately under the pressure. Rumsfeld embodied an old injunction: Never let them see you sweat.

But the downside with Rumsfeld was so great that few people are likely to remember the upside. He came to symbolize not simply the failure of the Iraq war but also the arrogance and lack of accountability. He had a knack for dropping phrases that came to symbolize what was wrong: "You go to war with the Army you have" and "Back off."..

A profile of his nominated successor, Robert Gates.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at November 9, 2006 05:33 PM