Conservatives Get It - Rumsfeld Must Go

Ralph Peters Turns on Distrusted Rumsfeld

ACCORDING to his handlers, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad to "boost troop morale." The best way the SecDef could improve morale would be to resign.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Rumsfeld and his apparatchiks boldly defended Washington while our troops fought overseas. Now that the battle's shifted to Capitol Hill in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the SecDef's in Iraq.

It's like all those press briefings in which he answers the questions when things are going well, but defers to those in uniform when things are going badly.

Rumsfeld's "vision" was to lavish money on the defense industry and administration-friendly contractors, while sending too few troops to war, with too little battlefield equipment, inadequate supplies and no long-range plan. As one Army colonel put it in the heat of battle, "We're winning this despite OSD."

Contractors grow rich. The Army grows exhausted. And every single prediction about the future of warfare made by the Rumsfeld gang proved incorrect. Airpower doesn't win wars on its own. Technology doesn't trump courage, guts and skill. Both war and its aftermath still require adequate numbers of well-trained, disciplined troops. And serious planning.

We need a bigger Army. We got a bigger budget - but the money is going to CEOs, not to G.I. Joe.

Outsourcing? We see now where that gets us. In Rumsfeld's military, you even outsource leadership. As we did at Abu Ghraib prison.

Even if none of the above mattered, Rumsfeld needs to go because he has utterly lost the trust of the officer corps. He isn't a leader. He's an arrogant ideologue unfit to serve our democracy.

It's time to bring integrity, mutual respect and a focus on the realities of warfare back to the Pentagon. The White House has Sen. McCain's phone number.

el - I am frankly amazed I agree on something with Peters.