Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

Sullivan (who has been calling for Rumsfeld's firing for some time now) posts this little snippet from Rumsfeld's recent "press availability":
Q: Is the country closer to a civil war? SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.I can just picture Rumsfeld during the American Civil War: "Well, there was a lot of violence at Antietam today, and in some other areas, and yet in many states there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing." I mean, couldn't this be said about any war, that the violence is concentrated in a few areas? "Well, there was a lot of violence on the beaches of Normandy today, and on the Eastern Front, but to call it a World War is ridiculous, because many regions of the globe are relatively calm."

So I guess its not a civil war unless everyone is killing everyone else everywhere at once. What's even scarier than his ridiculous definition of a civil war is his cavalier attitude to whether it is a civil war or not. You'd think this would be a matter of grave concern to the Secretary of Defense. But he brushes it off as if it's an academic debate about some obscure term nobody feels that strongly about.

UPDATE: The Columbia Journalism Review Daily picks up my take on Rumsfeld and is most complimentary.