Donald Rumsfeld

Monday.

Advent Calendar.

Seems like America is beginning to realise what the rest of the World has known for a long time - Rumsfeld is a liability!

The influential, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, who had championed the war in Iraq - published an article calling for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

The piece caused shockwaves in Washington no doubt but the Senate predictably rallied behind the Defense Secretary. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that this was not the time to change leadership at the Pentagon though they accepted that serious mistakes in U.S. policy had been made in Iraq.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card emphasised President Bush's confidence in Rumsfeld on ABC's "This Week", Sunday. "Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a spectacular job," he said.

He sure is Mr Card. Have a look at what the rest of the World's press is saying.

Seems to me that the general consensus is that Rumsfeld is doing anything but a "spectacular job".

The "spectacular job" he's doing has resulted in an understandable reluctance to join the National Guard these days - now that Service in the Guard is no longer a part-time job. About 40 percent of the U.S. troops in Iraq come from the Guard or the Army Reserve.

The Guard's commander, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum told reporters at the Pentagon, "A Guard member who has served in the military before will now receive $15,000 as a bonus — tax-free if the member signs up while deployed overseas". He also admitted, "We are correcting some of our recruiting themes and slogans to reflect the reality of today. We're not talking about one weekend a month and two weeks a year and college tuition. We're talking about service to the nation." $15,000 as a bonus! — tax-free! - service to the nation!

It's about time that the Nation provided these guys with the right equipment and got the Defense Secretary to sign letters of condolence personally. According to a Stars and Stripes report Rumsfeld said, "I wrote and approved the now more than 1,000 letters sent to family members and next of kin of each of the servicemen and women killed in military action. While I have not individually signed each one, in the interest of ensuring expeditious contact with grieving family members, I have directed that in the future I sign each letter."

That's a lot of computer generated signatures Mr Rumsfeld and a lot of insulted family members. Don't these people realise how valuable your time is? As Kristol points out in his Washington Post story, "All defense secretaries in wartime have made misjudgments. Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But have any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?"

Get him out of there!