GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Rumsfeld may soon regret his arrogance

WASHINGTON -- By the early 1970s, after seven long and savage years of fighting in Vietnam, the phrase that came to characterize the pitiful hopelessness and absurdity of that conflict was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Unbelievably, our secretary of defense has just given us the existential phrases for the Iraq war: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
How could Donald Rumsfeld, a smart and savvy man despite his perverse fascination with conflict, possibly say such an insulting and arrogant thing to American soldiers? Is he really trying to tell them, as it surely sounded last Wednesday when he addressed American troops in Kuwait, that they are not the Army he wanted, but he had to put up with them?
Well, just maybe, if the cavalier attitude of the civilians in this administration toward American troops continues, there will come a time when our soldiers will not put up with THEM! Perhaps that was beginning last week in Kuwait.
To briefly review, one soldier in Kuwait, Spc. Thomas Wilson, a member of the Tennessee National Guard, confronted "Rummie" with a pointed question. "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait," he said. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?
"We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal ... that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat."
What's missing
Rumsfeld then made his incredible comment, pointing out to any rational person the degrees to which this administration is not so much lacking battlefield intelligence but basic human instinct. Even President Bush, whose own responses to the troops, despite his melodramatic public "emotion," are cool and distant, seemed to realize that Rumsfeld had gone too far.
"If I were a soldier overseas wanting to defend my country," he said from Washington, "I'd want to ask the secretary of defense the same question." (At this point, some of would like to ask him the question of why, as commander in chief, he hasn't asked it himself.)
Then it was revealed that the question had been worked out in concert with a journalist covering the troops, Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press -- and this fact was somehow meant to discredit the whole encounter. Sorry about that! Such exchanges of ideas -- and especially of complaints -- are not only part of the war scene, they are central and appropriate to it.
But let us not forget the context of Rumsfeld's words. This is Rumsfeld's war -- not America's, but his. He and his pugnacious neocon cohorts -- all of them still reigning in the Pentagon, and none of whom having ever served in the military -- ran all around the uniformed military's and the State Department's warnings about this war. They got exactly what they asked for: an adventure, a thoroughly unnecessary "war of choice," and a growing disaster-in-the-making.
Sens. Joseph Biden Jr. and Chuck Hagel just returned from Iraq, saying that not one American general said we were winning. Other warnings are the same. Rumsfeld's answer to everything is to train Iraqi forces to take the place of ours (perhaps because we, poor guys, only have "the Army we have & quot;), but they are falling apart in many Iraqi cities.
No apologies
And then Rumsfeld made things even worse. Responding to questions as to why he did not even remotely anticipate these intense "insurgencies," he answered blithely: "I don't think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you'd be in the degree of insurgency you're in today." No look at Iraqi history, no attempt to match ambition to potential, no common sense -- and surely no apologies!
You can see the anger beginning to build in the armed forces, with the "stop-loss" policies that force men and women to stay in uniform long after their terms are over, with the callousness about the armor, with the ludicrous analysis by the civilians in the Pentagon of what Iraq and its history were really like.
Now his unfortunate quote will go down in history to show how much he and his group, most of them remote and self-interested intellectuals, look at battlefield soldiers as chess pieces at their disposal. In the end, they care about nothing except their game.
Unviersal Presss Syndicate