There are few things as invigorating to read as the manly repartee between two GOP blowhards. In today's installment, we have
Bill O'Reilly, former correspondent for the "A Current Affair" syndicated "lifestyle and entertainment news" show, interviewing then-Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld.
Here are a few photos of the two men, just to refresh your memory:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/4...2985937829.jpg
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/...illyeaster.jpg
http://clintonwatch.net/images/oreil...kos_attack.jpg
http://www.vanceholmes.com/court/oreilly.jpg (broken link)
http://images.artnet.com/artwork_ima...ard-avedon.jpg
http://www.unicyclist.org/pics/DonaldRumsfeld.jpg
http://masbury.files.wordpress.com/2...eld-saddam.jpg
http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/delaubenfels/lindh.jpg
(oops, that's Rummy's good friend John Walker Lindh en route home from Afghanistan)
Action Figure - Donald Rumsfeld
(the Rummy doll toy - He Talks!)
Here are some highlights from that interview, conducted December 2, 2004:
DefenseLink News Transcript: Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Bill O'Reilly for The O'Reilly Factor
//
BILL O’REILLY:
What do you think is the biggest mistake the U.S.A has made in Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I suppose you could, one looking at it today with 20/20 hindsight, would say
it’s not anticipating, first of all, not finding WMD’s until, apparently it was wrong, or else they're buried or else we’ll find out something later. But at the moment it looks like they weren’t there. And I suppose the second thing would be, more current, would be the fact of,
was it possible to better estimate the insurgency?
...
BILL O’REILLY: Did somebody say to you, look, once we depose Saddam, these guys are going to go and fight a guerrilla campaign? Did any general or human being that advises you tell you that?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, my goodness, I,
BILL O’REILLY: (Brent) Scowcroft, he was saying that.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Course you, we’ve heard everything. We heard they were going to burn the bridges, light up the oil wells,
BILL O’REILLY: Right.
DONALD RUMSFELD: There would be a humanitarian crisis, there would be a nasty refugee problem, that they were going to use weapons of mass destruction, so our people strapped on chemical suits every day.
We, you can find intelligence that says almost anything. If you're asking, was there any kind of understanding or agreement that there would likely be a long insurgency afterwards, I don't believe that anyone would say
if you dropped a plumb line through all that intelligence, that anyone would say that.
[Pause here to think just how much B.S. must be slung about by this guy in one of his staff meetings ... ]
...
BILL O’REILLY: Okay. So you wouldn't say that it was a mistake that the United States made, not putting more soldiers there to fight the insurgency in the beginning?
DONALD RUMSFELD: No, I think not. I mean, there have been a lot of people who thought there should be more troops in Afghanistan,
BILL O’REILLY: Right.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Not a question in Iraq. If you think about it,
the Soviets had two (hundred thousand) or three hundred thousand in Afghanistan. And lost. Think about that. We had seventeen thousand and won.
[Yeah, but is Rummy counting the Northern Alliance troops and those from all the other warlords that helped us kick Taliban butt out of the country?]
...
BILL O’REILLY: What, could we have done anything differently to fight this insurgency before it got out of hand?
DONALD RUMSFELD:
We have been doing things differently ever since we got in there.
In other words, what you have is a plan. And then you have a whole, a flexibility to, to deal with a whole set of excursions that might occur.
You're dealing not with a static situation, you're dealing with an enemy with a brain. They get up every morning, go to school on what we’re doing, and change what they’re doing to advantage themselves. We get up every morning, see what they’re doing, and change what we’re doing to advantage ourselves against what they’re doing.
BILL O’REILLY: How do we beat them?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, well, it’s a test of wills. I mean, they haven’t won a single battle the entire time since the end of, of major combat operations.
BILL O’REILLY: [OVERLAPPING VOICES]
Same thing happened in Vietnam, though,
DONALD RUMSFELD: [OVERLAPPING VOICES] They never, never won,
BILL O’REILLY: They never beat us.
...
BILL O’REILLY: Can you,
DONALD RUMSFELD: If you take the provinces, three-quarters of them are relatively peaceful.
BILL O’REILLY:
Within two years, can the United States beat these insurgents?
DONALD RUMSFELD: It is, the, the task is,
using the word 'beat' sounds like you're in a war.
BILL O’REILLY: Well, stabilize the country.
DONALD RUMSFELD: I think so. I think so. Well, I shouldn’t say that. The United States won’t do it, the Iraqi people will.
...
BILL O’REILLY: Again, I hope you're right. Now, we find out today, that Iran is now, has a long-range missile development system to go along with their nuclear development. Are we going to have to confront Iran militarily, in your opinion?
DONALD RUMSFELD: The President’s obviously decided thus far that it’s a diplomatic matter, and he’s been trying to work with European allies and with the United Nations to get the, I.A.W -- the IAEI to put pressure on the Iranians to behave differently with respect to their nuclear programs, [OVERLAPPING VOICES] and they haven’t.
And what one has to do at that stage is continue to put pressure on them, and it’s up to the countries of the United Nations to decide what kind of steps they may or may not want to take.
BILL O’REILLY:
But the United Nations is corrupt, weak, and ineffective.
DONALD RUMSFELD:
It ultimately stepped up pretty much on the Iraqi matter.
BILL O’REILLY:
The United Nations did?
DONALD RUMSFELD:
Well sure, they passed resolutions finally,
...
BILL O’REILLY: So, what are the odds of us having to confront these people [Iran] militarily?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I guess that's, those are calls for the President to, or for the, or for other leaders of other countries to make, and, but, let me put it this way.
If you think about Iran, it is a big country. It is a country with an interesting history. It’s a country with an educated population. It is a country with a large number of women and young people who are being managed by a small handful of clerics in a way that is basically unacceptable to them. That is not a stable situation.
[O'Reilly missed his chance here to say, "You mean, like the United States." ]
BILL O’REILLY: No.
DONALD RUMSFELD: My hope is that over time we will see a shift in that country,
just as we saw a shift from the Shah to the Ayatollah. It happened almost overnight.
[On the other hand, ...
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 ]
BILL O’REILLY: But we can’t let a North Korea develop in Iran, can we? Where they got nuclear weapons, we can’t let that happen.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The Iranians are making a lot of mistakes, let me just put it that way.
BILL O’REILLY: All right.
DONALD RUMSFELD: And they're notably unhelpful in Afghanistan and they’re notably unhelpful in Iraq.
BILL O’REILLY: I’m going to take that as a, we can’t let another North Korea develop in Iran.
DONALD RUMSFELD:
I generally say roughly what I think. And I said they are being unhelpful.
...
BILL O’REILLY: Let’s hope so. Where is Osama?
DONALD RUMSFELD:
You sound like my wife.
BILL O’REILLY: [LAUGHS]
I hope that's a compliment.
[At this point, one can only wonder what could have happened between these two men, perhaps, say, in a parallel universe, if only Rummy had used the word 'loofah', er, 'falafel', or ... nevermind!
O'Reilly Hit With Sex Harass Suit - October 13, 2004 ]
...
BILL O’REILLY: What do you think of the
International Red Cross condemning the way the U.S.A is treating prisoners in Guantanamo Bay?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I have not had a chance to read the latest missive from them.
BILL O’REILLY: They basically say we’re torturing them.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Right.
BILL O’REILLY: That's what they say.
DONALD RUMSFELD:
They say basically that holding people for the long term without indicating to them, is tantamount to mental torture.
BILL O’REILLY: Do you agree with that?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I guess it’s not. I’m not a lawyer, and I, my attitude is that if uh, that our President and our country and our government and I support it, made a decision that we lost three thousand people in this country, on September 11. And they were killed by extremists. And, the idea that we should go out and try to stop extremists from killing three thousand more, or thirty thousand more, for that matter, that we, we should go out and, and capture or kill them, and
then release the ones that are alive, back into the terrorist movement so that they can kill more people, I just don’t understand that.
[Well, as long as you're
sure all of those we are holding in Gitmo are actually terrorists ...]
BILL O’REILLY: Well, they want them to have lawyers, is what the Human Rights Watch and all these people, they want them to have lawyers.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well the basic, I think the basic thing most recently from the I.C.R.C. is the concept that they’ve developed, which I don't think exists in the Geneva Convention,
BILL O’REILLY: It doesn’t,
DONALD RUMSFELD: It doesn’t exist in international law.
BILL O’REILLY: Right.
DONALD RUMSFELD: That they’ve decided on their own that it is tantamount to quote, torture, and of course that's a hot button word.
It’s tantamount to torture to keep somebody without telling them what, how long they're going to stay in jail. Well, every war, prisoners of war were kept in, without charges, without lawyers, until the war was over.
BILL O’REILLY:
They don’t see it as a war, the International Red Cross.
DONALD RUMSFELD: I understand.
BILL O’REILLY: So that's just, you're not taking that seriously.
DONALD RUMSFELD:
We just have a fundamental disagreement.
//
I wonder why O'Reilly didn't ask Rummy what difference it makes to the DoD to call these activities of fighting the terrorists a WAR. I think we just got part of the answer ...
Right, but at least Rummy already clarified things by saying that what's happening in Iraq, as of Dec. 2, 2004, is NOT a war!
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