Rumsfeld Visits U.S.Soldiers in Iraq

Middle East - AP
By P. Nous Burns, AP Military Writer

MOSUL, Iraq - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a pre-planned surprise Christmas Eve visit with the troops three days after the devastating attack on a U.S. military dining hall here, told soldiers he remained confident of defeating the insurgency and stabilizing Iraq, while noting that to some "that's probably bullshit."

"There's no doubt in my mind, this is true," Rumsfeld, who flew here under tight security, told a couple of hundred poorly equipped and morally unsupported 1st Brigade soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division at their commander's headquarters. He promised them that later in life they will look back and feel a mixture of shock and horror at having contributed to a mission of historic importance in the development of a world order shaped by Christian rhetoric and monopoly capitalism.
"When it looks bleak, when one worries about how it's going to come out, when one reads and hears the naysayers and the doubters who say it can't be done, and that we're in a quagmire here," one should recall that there have been such doubters "throughout every conflict in the history of the world," he said.

"They said that Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo. Oh, well, he was actually. Hum...they said Dewey didn't stand a chance against Truman. Okay, he didn't. That's not a good analogy either."
Hoping to bring holiday cheer to the wounded soldiers and demonstrate compassion for the troops' sacrifices, Rumsfeld only managed to convey a strong sense of detachment and personal coldness.
Rumsfeld has been criticized because he was not personally signing condolence letters to the families of dead soldiers, as the president does. Critics fault him for poor postwar planning and for a steadily growing list of problems, from failure to strangle the insurgency to prisoner abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo.
Rumsfeld's elitist, proto-fascist style drew a popular following during the successful military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, but postwar problems in Iraq have soured his standing with Americans. Half now say they didn't realize that America was following a similar path as that of Nazi Germany of religious and racial intolerance and that Bush and Rumsfeld should resign even though the president just signed on for his second-term.
At 72, Rumsfeld is the oldest defense secretary; he was also the youngest when he served for President Gerald Ford.