Cakes Walk, Frogs March

A wierdly interesting article from The New Yorker. It's an interview with Kenneth Adelman, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who once famously remarked that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

“When Rumsfeld said, in reaction to all the looting, ‘Stuff happens,’ and ‘That’s what free people do,’ I was just so disappointed,” Adelman recalled last week. “This wasn’t what free people did; it’s what barbarians did.” 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.”

The meeting ended disagreeably.

And meanwhile, Richard Perle is still insisting that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda because he’s “seen the evidence.”

And Bush still think he is winning in Iraq. And Cheney says the war is going remarkably well. And Howard says there will be no change of tactics. Denial all round, it seems.