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"Rumsfeld: We can only lose the war in America," not Iraq. Former Rumsfeld friend and Defense Policy Board member Ken Adelman tells the New Yorker that Rumsfeld has been in "deep denial -- deep deep denial" about Iraq from the beginning.
While Rumsfeld may have been the only one to articulate it as such, one might observe that the administration has for years seemed to treat Iraq largely as a domestic framing opportunity/problem.... Within the confines of the policy board, Adelman became blunt about his disenchantment with the Pentagon’s management of the war. At the board’s meeting this summer, Adelman said, he argued that the American military needed a new strategy.
“I suggested that we were losing the war,” Adelman said. “What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, ‘What’s the alternative? Because what we’re doing now is just losing.’ ”
Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn’t take to the message well. “He was in deep denial—deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, ‘Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.’ He got upset and cut me off. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went right on with it.”
Also worth reading, Andrew Bacevich writing earlier this week in the LA Times on score settling.