Bye Bye Rummy

With the swearing in of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense this morning, the failed Rumsfeld era comes to a close.

As we saw last week, the President and his Administration are going to try and paint a rosy picture of his tenure, but no amount of revisionist history can change the facts - that Donald Rumsfeld's history is one of deadly misjudgments and overly optimistic projections that never came to pass.

Here's a look back at some of his greatest misses:

Rumsfeld’s History Of Failure

September 2002: Rumsfeld Said Iraqis Would Start “Singing and Flying Kites” After Liberation. "Think of the faces in Afghanistan when the people were liberated, when they moved out in the streets and they started singing and flying kites and women went to school and people were able to function and other countries were able to start interacting with them. That's what would happen in Iraq." [Media Roundtable, 9/13/02]

February 2003: Rumsfeld “Doubts” the War Will Last Six Months. During a town hall meeting with troops, Rumsfeld said that if the US went to war in Iraq, although “it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” [Town Hall Meeting, 2/7/03]

March 2003: Rumsfeld Said “We Know Where” The WMD Are. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, when asked why the military had not found Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction yet, Rumsfeld said, “We know where [the WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” [ABC, 3/30/03]

June 2003: Rumsfeld Says Army's Estimates of Troops Needed For Post-War Iraq Were Too High. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz criticized the Army's chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, after Shinseki told Congress in February 2003 that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark." [USA Today, 6/2/03]

July 2003: Generals Admit Bush Administration Never Had Concrete Plan for Post-War Iraq. Bush administration officials and military personnel admitted that there was never a real plan for post-war Iraq operations. Posed with the question of whether the Army had an outlined plan for peacekeeping in Iraq, V Corps Commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace said “Well, we’re making this up here as we go along.” A former-senior administration official said, “There was no real planning for postwar Iraq.” Knight Ridder reported, “The disenchanted U.S. officials today think the failure of the Pentagon civilians to develop such detailed plans contributed to the chaos in post-Saddam Iraq. ‘We could have done so much better,’ lamented a former senior Pentagon official, who is still a Defense Department adviser.” [Newsweek, 7/21/03; Knight Ridder, 7/12/03, emphasis added]

February 2004: Rumsfeld Says “We Do Not Expect” to Have 115,000 Troops Permanently Deployed In Any One Place. “The increased demand on the force we are experiencing today is likely a ‘spike,’ driven by the deployment of nearly 115,000 troops in Iraq. We hope and anticipate that that spike will be temporary. We do not expect to have 115,000 troops permanently deployed in any one campaign.” [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 2/4/04]

December 2004: Rumsfeld Dismissed Shortage Of Armored Humvees, Told Troops To Go To War With What You Have. One soldier asked Rumsfeld why their combat vehicles were not properly armed. "You go to the war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld responded. "Not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later date." The response struck many military families as callous. [UPI, 12/9/04; CNN, 12/9/04]

August 2006: Rumsfeld Says There Is Violence, But No Civil War. When asked whether Iraq was fighting a civil war, Rumsfeld said, “There's no question there's a high level of sectarian violence…[which is] a shame…But it -- the people who look at it contend that they're not in it, and the government of Iraq says they're not in a civil war…” [Department of Defense News Briefing, 8/22/06]