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Rummy's Body Count

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Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2006, at 12:52 PM ET

One wonders whether the Pentagon deliberately misses the point of the retired generals' criticisms. It isn't more meetings they want. They just want Rumsfeld to open his mind up to what the uniformed military has to say.

Case in point: Who cares how many "roundtable" meetings Rumsfeld attends? According to Army General Paul D. Eaton, ret., who trained the Iraqi military in 2003 and 2004, Rumsfeld has been "ignoring the advice of seasoned officers." He meets with them, but he doesn't listen to them.
If we must play this numbers game, it's mildly interesting to observe that Rumsfeld met more with combatant commanders than with service chiefs. Meeting with combatant commanders is obviously a good thing. But the fact that Rumsfeld meets less with the service chiefs, who after all work in the very same building he does, suggests that, like Gen. Tommy Franks, the team-playing former Army commander in Iraq, Rummy regards the service chiefs as "title X motherfuckers." That's how Franks labeled them in his memoir, American Soldier. He didn't mean it as a compliment. Title X of the U.S. Code governs appointment of service chiefs.
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Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2006, at 12:52 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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