Things about other countries

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/

--ラムズフェルド国防長官によっていかに攻撃的にアメリカが戦争に突入していったか、そしてその過程と結果を映像とインタビューで検証したもの。

最初の半分を見逃した。ラムズフェルドの若い頃の姿が見れなくて残念。今、７１歳の国防長官は、バリバリの戦争好きな爺さんにしか見えない。オーバーなアクション、大きな声、かつてはハンサムであったような正当派白人の顔立ち。
証言する人々が語る。「ラムズフェルドは考えるタイプの人間ではない。行動する人だ」。もとレスリングの選手で、アクションに次ぐアクション、行動につぐ行動で生きて来た人のよう。「彼は今でもレスラー時代と同じようだ。負けがこんでいても人前では決して弱音をはかない。歯を食いしばって平静な顔で攻撃を続けている」。でもそれがイラク戦争を泥沼化しているとしたら。
彼はなぜ、そんなに戦争がしたかったのだろう。ゲーム感覚で、アメリカ軍の実力を実践で試してみたかったのか。アフガンを攻撃したのは分からなくもないが、なぜイラク？
アブグレイブ収容所の捕虜虐待の責任問題、かつての閣僚の
反ブッシュ内閣発言の数々を含め、ラムズフェルドのイメージは日に日に冴えなくなっていく一方。もはや崖っぷちにいるようなもので、共和党大会にも登場しなかった。

PBSが連日、この手のプログラムを放映する裏にはやはりニューヨーク・リベラルの策略があるのか。とてもじゃないが、共和党のプラスになるプログラムではないし。


証言ーーーーーーーーーーーーーー
He was the defense secretary under Ford, just coming out of Vietnam, the youngest defense secretary. He survived a coup, if you will, in the national security arena that involved other members who were ousted at the time. He was actually Cheney's boss for a little while. He was a fighter pilot for a while, Navy, and a wrestler. I think it's very apt of his personality. He's very forceful. You can see that on the podium when he bats away the reporters' questions over and over again and does it with not only talent and humor, but repetition. And he is a very strong, dominant personality. He is very confident about breaking the china and moving ahead with his own vision of how things should be. And he doesn't let generals stand in the way, he doesn't let Congress stand in the way, he doesn't let the Army institution stand in the way; he just goes forward.

He has a small group of people around him, and they got the reputation among the civilians who had been there as career civil servants for years, and also the military, that they were very insular, that there is a cabal of people that really runs the show. And that's still a feeling that is carried on to today. ﾉ


In September 2003, you are traveling with the secretary of defense. What's that like?

When I traveled with Rumsfeld in September, the first thing that was impressive was he was right in the middle of all of us all the time. He actually sat in the front of a row of maybe 20 rows of seats that were airline passenger seats but in the middle of a cargo plane. I'm not going to tell you the latrine story. It's too bizarre.


Oh, go ahead!

So he would sit in the front row for eight hours straight, mostly reading, but also getting up and stretching. And he sat right in front of the Porta-Potty that was there, for use by anybody, everybody. So instead of any kind of comfortable place, he was right in the middle of the action, in a place where, you know, most people would choose not to be. So he's impressive physically in that way, in the sense that he can endure, at his age, endure a lot of bumping around and traveling. And he's fairly affable about taking press questions just as they come at him, and in a relaxed way. But he's very disciplined in what he says, in terms of what he gives away. ...


Pentagon correspondent, The Washington Post.

ﾉ Does Rumsfeld have a tragic flaw?

I heard from associates of Rumsfeld -- from generals, but also from civilians he's worked with for a long time -- that he perhaps had lost a step as he'd aged, and he was not assimilating information as fast as he had in the past. One friend of his said to me that he makes up his mind too early. He loves to jump on information and make the decision. He said, "He didn't do it as well as he did in the past." This was background chatter at the Pentagon, but it had never been put foursquare in front of the public until the report by former Defense Secretary [under Nixon James] Schlessinger came in on Abu Ghraib. It specifically faulted all levels of the chain of command and included the highest levels -- that is to say, Rumsfeld's office and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, their staff and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. [Richard B.] Myers -- saying they had failed in that crucial period in the summer and the fall of 2003 to respond adequately to events on the ground in Iraq. There were new things that were occurring. They didn't take it on; they didn't act with all the things that Rumsfeld has talked about in transformation were necessary -- with agility, with the ability to quickly assimilate new information. That didn't happen.

Rumsfeld has a very interesting mind. It really struck me looking at some of his internal memos that he would have been a great high school English teacher. There's a muscularity and clarity and simplicity to his prose which is really unusual, not only in the U.S. government but anywhere in American life these days. He is a good writer, and good writing, as [George] Orwell tells us, reflects good thinking. ﾉ


Is Rumsfeld, deep down, a neocon? Was he won over by them?

Rumsfeld doesn't strike me as an ideological guy. He strikes me as a very pragmatic guy. The division of labor at the Pentagon seems to be that Rumsfeld is the hands-on manager, and the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, is kind of the big thinker, the visionary. What you get is a disconnection between Rumsfeld, the skeptical, pragmatic, corporate type, and the Bush administration's vision of transforming the Middle East, which is the opposite of the pragmatic, realpolitik approach you might get that Rumsfeld would have.

Paul Wolfowitz and some of the more ideologically-minded members of the Bush administration are saying, "We need to change the entire Middle East." Now, they present this as a pragmatic approach. Yet that is a hugely ambitious project never really discussed and laid out by the Bush administration as it goes into Iraq: How long is this going to take? How much is it going to cost? Do we have a military establishment adequately sized for that job? What other resources do you plan to bring to that? Those are the type of questions you might expect a Rumsfeld to ask. There wasn't a lot of public discussion. It's only about a year later, when Rumsfeld's "long, hard slog" memo comes out and USA Today gets ahold of it, and Rumsfeld is indeed asking those questions. But it's, I think, October 2003 when those questions are being asked, when the United States has already committed on the ground in Iraq in the middle of kind of an unexpected war.

I think Rumsfeld sees himself very much as a strategic manager, a guy who looks at the military machine and questions it and prods it and moves it along. Yet he finds himself presiding over a profoundly ideological task of occupying Iraq, at least originally, with the intent of making it a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, transforming the entire region. And to have somebody like Rumsfeld assigned that task, I find it extraordinary. The man and the task don't seem to match up.


So how happy is Donald Rumsfeld to find out that he's inherited that task?

Donald Rumsfeld would never tell you he's unhappy with that. He would never say something like that in public. He'd grit his teeth and put his shoulder down. I remember somebody talking about him as a wrestler. His great strength as a wrestler was that he wouldn't give up even when he knew he was beaten. He would just keep on slogging away. Sometimes when I look at Iraq, I kind of feel that that's where we're at, a Rumsfeld wrestling match. And it does worry me, this notion of staying the course, because as Rumsfeld himself says, "When you're at the bottom of a hole, it's not necessarily the smartest thing to keep on digging."


Prewar, is Rumsfeld listening to the Iraqi National Congress as they push for war?

Rumsfeld has probably said to Wolfowitz and [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas] Feith and his policy people: "Look, we all know the intelligence community sometimes get things wrong. Make sure that we really have a good handle on this." And there are some people at the Pentagon who really think that Chalabi and his outfit have got good information, and sometimes they do. Despite Chalabi's image now, when I was in Baghdad, you got good information sometimes from the Chalabi people. It wasn't like they were totally wrong about everything. They just happened to seem wrong about weapons of mass destruction and the other things that got the United States involved in the war. Now, if you go back and read the Senate Intelligence Committee report, some of the sources that they seem to provide were some of the sources that ultimately were most misleading. But clearly this administration embraced Chalabi. There's a reason he was sitting behind the first lady at the State of the Union address. Nobody wants to talk about it now, but they thought he was the guy. They really did. And I think Wolfowitz especially seemed to.（以下省略）