Daniel Drezner Is Depressed

Doc Drezner has a link-filled post on the Abu Ghraib prison debacle. Here is a better Radioland permalink to the NY Times story in which we learn that Bush is really, really peeved at Rumsfeld. I encourage everyone to think back to their position on Reno and Waco, then commence firing.

My view - there would be two reasons to fire Rumsfeld. One would be substantive - he failed to pursue the investigation aggressively and alert appropriate people, such as the President or the Congress.

The second would be symbolic - in an earlier Japan, we would be studying his innards by now, seeing as how he (through his subordinates) disgraced a nation.

The WaPo thinks a broad case can be made on substance; I'm not sure it matters. My guess is that the White House wants to see how he holds up under the bright Congressional lights on Friday, gauge the Sunday talk show circuit, and address this next week.

Janet Reno wasn't sacked, George Tenet still has a job, and Don Rumsfeld may keep his. But I favor a ritual sacrifice at this point.

The key person to watch, for obvious reasons, is John McCain:

McCain, 67, an Arizona Republican who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee that will question Rumsfeld tomorrow, stopped short of pressing Bush to fire his defense secretary.

``I don't presume to tell the president what he should do,'' McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said on the ``Early Show'' this morning on CBS. ``But it's obvious that there's a lot of explaining that Secretary Rumsfeld and others have to do.''

Fans of this sort of thing will enjoy the following:

Calls for Rumsfeld's resignation are ``premature,'' said Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican and his party's former leader in the Senate.

Timing is everything, as none know better.

Tom Friedman wants the US to announce an unconditional surrender, BTW. Folks may take special exception to this snippet:

Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page. Second, he needs to explain that we are losing in Iraq, and if we continue to lose the U.S. public will eventually demand that we quit Iraq, and it will then become Afghanistan-on-steroids, which will threaten everyone. Third, he needs to say he will be guided by the U.N. in forming the new caretaker government in Baghdad. And fourth, he needs to explain that he is ready to listen to everyone's ideas about how to expand our force in Iraq, and have it work under a new U.N. mandate, so it will have the legitimacy it needs to crush any uprisings against the interim Iraqi government and oversee elections — and then leave when appropriate. And he needs to urge them all to join in.

And The World's Greatest Paper (when they want to be) digs up some old psychology studies from the early 70's to teach us about prison abuse. Very interesting, and not done anymore, as we learn at the conclusion of the story:

Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers have decided that they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress — four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns — that the experiments are unethical.

Gregory Djerejian wants heads to roll; I was hoping for more support for my disemboweling idea.

MORE: This story and photo will cheer up Bushies. Briefly, in my case.

UPDATE: A late breaker from the Times: "Bush Says He's Sorry for Abuse of Iraqis, Then Backs Rumsfeld". The Times picks up the McCain watch with the same quote we ran above (stalking McCain was my insight du jour - humor me).

We find a bit of comic relief in the story. First, a Bushism, as the President stands by his man - "Secretary Rumsfeld is a really good secretary of defense." Really?

And the Times seems to be serious with this next bit - "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in an editorial, called on the secretary to resign, citing an "accumulation" of "miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps" extending beyond the prisoner issue. Why are they bringing me editorials from fly-over country? Or, if there is a reason, give me a hint.

Comments

[WillieStyle]

Wow, substance!
Good post man. I will say this:
If Bush is going to fire Rumsfeld, then he should make it abundantly clear to everyone that it's because of the torture scandals and not the insurections. Wouldn't want to give Sadr et al any unnecessary PR victories however pyric.

[TM]

"Wow, substance!"

Don't get accustomed to it. Actually, I was going to hide behind Doctor D and quit after the first paragraph, but even I was appalled by my gutlessness.

It would be great if Rumsfeld stepped down after some good news from Iraq. And there might be some, if we can believe this:

NAJAF, MAY 6: US troops attacked Shi’ite militia forces around Najaf on Thursday, seizing the local governor’s offices and killing 41 fighters, an official in the US occupation authority said. In what seemed a broad move against insurgents across southern Iraq, US tanks moved unopposed into the centre of Karbala, destroying offices used by the Mahdi Army militia of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

John McCain ought to take the opportunity to say something like, "What a bunch of wusses these Iraqi illegal combatants are. I'd have traded places with them any day from my cell in the Hanoi Hilton. Torture? Ha! And I was a lawful POW covered by the Geneva Convention"

As for Bush's "apology"; big mistake. He should have said that it is a difficult job eliciting information from the kind of people we've got to work over...er, with. Some of them might have been connected to the recent attempt to kill 80,000 Jordanians. Say, Abdullah, how did your secret police manage to find out about it, anyway?"