The Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi wrote a column today arguing that Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon must, for everyone’s sake, end very soon. But Vennochi also noted that it’s not the left that’s giving Rumsfeld the most trouble.
There is a drumbeat, and at this moment it is coming from the right, not the left.
She has a point. Bill Kristol, John McCain, and Chuck Hagel have all insisted that Rumsfeld is a failure. But Vennochi, like Kevin Drum yesterday, also added another name to the mix: Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
Schwarzkopf, interviewed on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” chided Rumsfeld for his reply to a soldier in Kuwait over the lack of armor on many military vehicles used in Iraq.
“I was very, very disappointed — no, let me put it stronger — I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up,” Schwarzkopf said.
Schwarzkopf, a registered independent who campaigned for Bush in the last two presidential elections, has previously criticized Rumsfeld on several occasions as arrogant and out of touch with troops on the ground.
Monday, Schwarzkopf said the Defense Department had badly misjudged the situation in Iraq. Reserve forces were rushed into urban combat — “toughest kind of fighting” — without adequate training, and “things have gone awry.”
Rumsfeld is no doubt enjoying the fact that the media is focusing on the fact that Bernard Kerik may be America’s dumbest person, which is helping to keep some of the heat off the hapless Defense Secretary, but if the Republican detractors keep their criticisms up, Rumsfeld may very well have to write a nice note to the president about wanting to spend more time with his family.