What the hell is that incompetent moron doing talking about tactics?
I want my fucking flowers and candy you promised.
fucking cobag.

damn, I stayed at a friends house yesterday so I missed the whole D-ho controversy.

Since Ann said that you guys were only purportedly lefty, I’m glad that you reaffirmed your allegiance with two posts featuring some objectively pro-terror photographs.

Since Ann said that you guys were only purportedly lefty, I’m glad that you reaffirmed your allegiance with two posts featuring some objectively pro-terror photographs.

I know. I love being stripped of my own ideology by the All-Powerful Enforcer of Leftism.

Great post, I agree with all the points you raised. Sadly though, you are still a poop face, Brad.

Great post, I agree with all the points you raised. Sadly though, you are still a poop face, Brad.

Don’t you see how what you just said is postpatriarchal anti-excrementic?

Condi isn’t too bright–she forgot that the meme is to lie ALL of the time.

So, Brad-

Now that you’re a racist misogynist, are you going to be entering the Wingnut Challenge? Are you up to facing Pastor Giles or K-Gro in an arena of pure bigotry?

I think you are. Further, I have enough space on my ample gut to write your name in greasepaint. I am SO THERE.

(ps: Left my Mea Culpa at the end of the clusterfuck thread below- sorry about all that.)

So Condi and Rummy are now publicly bitch-slapping one another?

She’s supposed to be a diplomat, remember? You know, one other those people who has skills of diplomacy, neogitation, maintaining good relationships, etc. So she goes on the public record while standing on foreign soil, saying, in essence, that The Secretary of Defense fucked up thousands of times? Doesn’t somebody vet her words? Or does she write them in her hotel room at night after a few bottles of claret?

So then Rummy’s all “Did not!”

And Condi’s all, “Well, I was only joking.”

And Rummy’s like “What the fuck do you know anyway?”

Love it.

Well, at least they’re only responsible for scores of thousands of deaths. I mean, they’re not involved in some kind of gay prostitute reporter/child porn ring. That would be bad.

Implosions are fun to watch.

Here’s the thing that gets me about Rummy saying “changing tactics does not equal an error”….

People told him BEFORE the war started that his tactical strategy sucked. People who were ACTUAL soldiers, like Colin Powell. Rumsfeld is, after all, the one bearing final responsibility for the “Rusmfeld Doctrine” of smaller, theoretically more maneuverable military forces that led to us having what lots of military guys have insisted were too few troops on the ground from the get-go.

See, this would be changing tactics because the tactics you adopted in the first place were *wrong* – just like people told you they were. And that’s a fancy way of saying *error*. As in “Donald Rumsfeld made an error.”

Their public intra-cabal meltdown would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that their incoherent policies hadn’t already killed and wounded so many thousands of people…

I can’t quite place it but I’m pretty sure that somebody used to tell us that changing tactics was a terrible mistake. That electing someone who would change tactics would leave America open to a devastating terrorist attack. There was even some catchy slogan to emphasise this point. “Keep on course”, or “Stay the horse”. Something like that, anyway. I wonder who that was.

I know that this blog can’t be all racist/sexist taunts all the time, but at least one taunt per post would establish a nice rhythm.

Heh. Chechk out the photo on Huff Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Rumsfeld defended his war plan for Iraq but added that such plans inevitably do not survive first contact with the enemy.

So why even take the time to formulate a plan? It’s like saying “we got lost on the way to your house. We had directions, but such directions inevitably don’t survive first contact with the road”. If your plan is destined to fail no matter what it is, why plan?

How dare you misspell “con dolcezza” as “Condoleezza”? (Wikipedia tells me her name is “derived from the Italian music-related expression, ‘Con dolcezza,’ meaning ‘with sweetness’.”) Are you saying African Americans don’t know how to spell Italian? Racist.

By the way, it may seem I crossed a line just there, but really I am not implying that what I accused you of is true. I was just trying to be funny. You know, after the stuff that went down yesterday. And I’m just coward enough to make another post to clarify myself.

So why even take the time to formulate a plan? It’s like saying “we got lost on the way to your house. We had directions, but such directions inevitably don’t survive first contact with the road”. If your plan is destined to fail no matter what it is, why plan?

That’s why you’re supposed to have more than one plan. which they clearly didn’t have.

I’m here to say Rummy is right, we haven’t made thousands of tactical errors – every mistake was strategic, which is much worse. Rummy was actually getting in Condi’s face for underplaying the fuckup.

or not.

Randy Rhodes and several irate current and ex-military callers made a point I haven’t seen anywhere else:

Tactics is what the guys in field do. Strategy is what the guys in the cozy offices do.

To a military guy, when Condi says “There were thousands of tactical errors” she’s actually saying “We had good policy and strategy, but those damn useless soldiers kept screwing it up!”

The proper administration response to that comment is “How DARE you! Why do you hate our soldiers? Support the troops! Where’s your magnet? WOLVERINES!”

But no, Rummy is so completely detached from the military mindset that he doesn’t even realize what’s been said.

Dorothy, you’re right about strategy/tactics in general, but here I think you’re wrong. One of the key criticisms coming out of the State Department, former CPA officials and ex military about the waging of the Iraq war has been how much the White House and Rumsfeld’s wing of the DoD micromanaged battlefield tactics, to disastrous effect. For example:

“A flip-flop by George W. Bush worsened the military-political debacle in Fallujah last April when the Bush administration overruled the Marine commanding general twice, first ordering him to undertake a retaliatory assault against the rebellious Iraqi city and then abruptly reversing direction three days later.

Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who commanded U.S. forces in western Iraq, told reporters that he opposed the decision to attack Fallujah in April and then – after committing Marines to the battle – he objected to the follow-up order to cease offensive operations and pull back, a decision that effectively ceded the city to insurgents as a “no-go� zone for American troops.

“We follow our orders,� Conway said in the interview on Sept. 12 after relinquishing his command.

The order to attack Fallujah in early April followed tough talk in Washington about punishing those responsible for the gruesome deaths of four armed U.S. contractors whose vehicles were ambushed in Fallujah on March 31.

Senior U.S. officials in Iraq say the order overruling the Marine commander, who favored a more measured response, originated from Bush’s White House, the Washington Post reported. Conway said he and other Marine officers had a more deliberative plan for bringing the city under control.”

Ginger,

Wow, it’s worse than I thought. Rumsfeld is so detached from the military that he doesn’t even know what his job is. Ew.

Ginger, I’m sorry to be pedantic, but the decision to attack a city or not is indeed a strategic decision, and not a tactical one. In any case, Rice is using the term “tactical” in a different sense than the simple complement of “strategic”. She is saying that the practical decisions involved with realizing the goals of the Iraq war were not always correct. It is an acceptance of responsibility for the way the Iraq war has gone. It is also a subtle defense of the policy itself, in that it implies lessons learned and useful experience for similar future endeavors. I don’t believe it was intended to reflect on the military, but rather it seemed to be a bone tossed to the reality-based community around the world.

Yours — Ally

“Can anyone out there explain how it’s possible to make thousands of figurative tactical errors?”

Yes; in actuality, the war has been one long enormous seamless error, thus breaking it down into thousands of tactical errors is a figurative gesture.

In fairness to Condi, what she apparently meant was that there were an unknown number of tactical errors, not that the tactical errors themselves were figurative. She is backtracking to say that when she said “thousands” she may as well have said, millions or kajillions. Not that she will own up to what those errors are, or that if the errors are big enough (like not planning for an insurgency, not training the Iraqi army quickly enough or alienating our allies), it doesn’t matter if the numbers of errors are small.