Rummy says the photos and videos are only going to get worse when they come out. This failure of leadership by Bush is going to cause more Muslims to join up with the fundametalist terrorists to attack and kill Americans while sewing the seeds for strained relations with the moderates throughout the Middle East that want to believe in us and create a better Iraq. Could this war be @#$%ed up any worse? We'll find out soon because with Bush's record an awful hell is sure to follow.

May 9, 2004
NY TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
World of Hurt
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Good golly, you knew Rummy wasn't going to pretend to stay contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the Pearl Harbor of PR, as Republican Tom Cole called it.

The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain pounced and Hillary prodded. But soon he was once more giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off himself.

By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see Donald-Duck steam coming out of his ears.

"Whether they have a PX or a good restaurant is not the issue," he said with a veiled sneer.

Rummy was having a dickens of a time figuring out how a control-freak administration could operate in this newfangled age when G.I.'s have dadburn digital cameras.

In the information age, he complained to senators, "people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, mourned that America was in a "world of hurt." If Gen. Richard Myers knew enough to try to suppress the CBS show, Mr. Graham asked, why didn't he know enough to warn the president and Congress?

Donald Rumsfeld, a black belt at Washington infighting, knew the aggrieved lawmakers were most interested in an apology for not keeping them in the loop. He no doubt was sorry — sorry the pictures got out.

The man who promised last July that "I don't do quagmires" didn't seem to be in trouble on Friday, despite the government's blowing off repeated Red Cross warnings.

But who knows what the effect will be of the additional "blatantly sadistic and inhuman" photos that Mr. Rumsfeld warned of? Or the videos he said he still had not screened?

Dick Cheney will not cut loose his old mentor from the Nixon and Ford years unless things get more dire.

After all, George Tenet is still running the C.I.A. after the biggest intelligence failures since some Trojan ignored Cassandra's chatter and said, "Roll the horse in." Colin Powell is still around after trash-talking to Bob Woodward about his catfights with the Bushworld "Mean Girls" — Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and Doug Feith. The vice president still rules after promoting a smashmouth foreign policy that is more Jack Palance than Shane. And the president still edges out John Kerry in polls, even though Mr. Bush observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV: "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country, and we will help them rid Iraq of these killers."

The only people who have been pushed aside in this administration are the truth tellers who warned about policies on taxes (Paul O'Neill); war costs (Larry Lindsey); occupation troop levels (Gen. Eric Shinseki); and how Iraq would divert from catching the ubiquitous Osama (Richard Clarke).

Even if the secretary survives, the Rummy Doctrine — using underwhelming force to achieve overwhelming goals — is discredited. Jack Murtha, a Democratic hawk and Vietnam vet, says "the direction's got to be changed or it's unwinnable," and Lt. Gen. William Odom, retired, told Ted Koppel that Iraq was headed toward becoming an Al Qaeda haven and Iranian ally.

By the end, Rummy was channeling Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup, who lashed out at the snotty weenies questioning him while they sleep "under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it."

Asked how we can get back credibility, Rummy bridled. "America is not what's wrong with the world," he said, adding: "I read all this stuff — people hate us, people don't like us. The fact of the matter is, people line up to come into this country every year because it's better here than other places, and because they respect the fact that we respect human beings. And we'll get by this."

Maybe. But for now, the hawks who wanted to employ American might to scatter American values like flower petals all across the world are reduced to keeping them from being trampled by Americans. As Rummy would say, not a pretty picture.



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