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Rumsfeld put bible quotes on the daily Iraq War updates? What's up with that?

 
 
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 11:52 am
Texan journalist Robert Draper has found daily cover sheets that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld approved for the daily Worldwide Intelligence Update. GQ has posted 11 of them:

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old europe
 
  3  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 12:00 pm
The GQ Article can be found here. Intro:

Quote:
AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics"his administration peers"are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”
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DontTreadOnMe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 12:45 pm
why am i not surprised?
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dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 01:31 pm
I'm shocked!!!
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djjd62
 
  2  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 01:35 pm
holy words for a holy war, they believed they were the modern day crusaders
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rosborne979
 
  2  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 02:04 pm
@old europe,
More poor judgement in a long string of bad judgement.

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dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 03:21 pm
@old europe,
puke....and way worse than puke.

sozobe
 
  3  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 03:32 pm
@dlowan,
Just read Frank Rich's Op-ed, which dealt with this among other things:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17rich-5.html

I thought he had two good points here (why Rumsfeld did it, and how bad it would've been had it leaked at the time):

Frank Rich wrote:
Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
Debra Law
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 03:40 pm
Here's one that has been forgotten during our government's less than admirable "war on terror" on our behalf:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36 (King James Version)



dyslexia
 
  2  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 03:53 pm
@Debra Law,
My thinking is more along the lines of Losing the war after winning all the battles.
dlowan
 
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Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 03:55 pm
@sozobe,
Quote:
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”


Same article.

Someone is SURPRISED????
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mysteryman
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 04:49 pm
@dyslexia,
like we did in Vietnam?
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 04:57 pm
@mysteryman,
strangely similar. the thing MM is I was in Vietnam and you were in Iraq.
DontTreadOnMe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 05:42 pm
@dyslexia,
dyslexia wrote:

strangely similar. the thing MM is I was in Vietnam and you were in Iraq.


it must be incredibly frustrating for both of you guys.
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 05:46 pm
@DontTreadOnMe,
DontTreadOnMe wrote:

dyslexia wrote:

strangely similar. the thing MM is I was in Vietnam and you were in Iraq.


it must be incredibly frustrating for both of you guys.
not really, I consider it a learning experience, I've never believed my government since then.
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mysteryman
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 05:48 pm
@DontTreadOnMe,
And it wasnt for me because I saw all the good we were doing in Iraq, before things went sour.
DontTreadOnMe
 
  2  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 05:58 pm
@mysteryman,
mysteryman wrote:

And it wasnt for me because I saw all the good we were doing in Iraq, before things went sour.


i'm just curious, since you were there. when do see it as going south? i'm not trying to line up a shot.
mysteryman
 
  2  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 06:02 pm
@DontTreadOnMe,
After we captured Saddam.
In any war, capturing the enemies leader has almost always ended the war.
Once we did that, we should have packed up and left.

By not leaving, we became occupiers instead of liberators.
And yes, fighting the groups doing the attacks on civilians is a good thing, but we shouldnt be there doing it.
DontTreadOnMe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 17 May, 2009 06:05 pm
@mysteryman,
mysteryman wrote:

After we captured Saddam.
In any war, capturing the enemies leader has almost always ended the war.
Once we did that, we should have packed up and left.

By not leaving, we became occupiers instead of liberators.
And yes, fighting the groups doing the attacks on civilians is a good thing, but we shouldnt be there doing it.


that was my perception as well. i know everyone is going to do their best, but it's going to be a really difficult exit.
0 Replies
 
Robert Gentel
 
  3  
Reply Thu 21 May, 2009 01:51 am
@mysteryman,
mysteryman wrote:
And yes, fighting the groups doing the attacks on civilians is a good thing, but we shouldnt be there doing it.


We'd have removed a tyrant to replace with a bloodbath to establish the next tyrant. Given that Saddam was contained and did not pose the threat to his own people or other nations that this chaos would present, that would have been a very pointless cruelty to Iraq.

In order to establish a democratic government in Iraq it was necessary to become an occupier, and as such there are legal obligations to provide security.

In order to conclusively search for WMDs it was necessary to occupy Iraq.

I could go on, but basically every objective and pretext used to sell this war required a lot more than to stiff the Iraqis on security after breaking their country.

I subscribe to the "you break it you bought it" philosophy here, and am always surprised at the willingness to cut our own losses when we are responsible for the whole mess.

Plunging Iraq into the chaos that there would have been in a power vacuum is something I would find much worse than the war as it was prosecuted, and that's saying a lot as I consider it the worst US foreign policy decision of my lifetime.

Would you really think the war would be a net positive just to capture Saddam and leave the country to chaos? States like Iran would have had a field day, it's just not a net positive any way you slice that. The Sunni/Shiite conflict would have played out so much worse, and could have rendered Iraq unstable for decades.

If we pulled out after capturing Saddam, I think we would have had to come back shortly anyway in an even worse situation (possibly even destabilizing the whole region).

"Liberator" is a meaningless word if it means everyone "liberated" is left in far worse shape than they were found in.
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