corrente

You should read this piece from Newsweek about Rumsfeld's creation of a "report no evil" culture at the Pentagon. Here's the "money quote":

And yet there was Rumsfeld and his faithful (perhaps too faithful) JCS chairman, General Myers, telling Congress last week that they had read the report of their own investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, only after it was widely quoted by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Rumsfeld, who commands the most powerful military in the history of the world, verged on the pathetic in the hearings, complaining that he had been unable to get hold of a plastic disk with the offending pictures until only the night before. At one point he lamented that nobody had come forward to rescue him from his own poor PR instincts. "It breaks our hearts," he said, "that in fact someone did not say, 'Wait. Look, this is terrible. We need to do something ...' " If Rumsfeld had been a better leader, maybe someone would have.

You should also read this piece by Fareed Zakaria that really hits the nail on the head:

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."

...

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

Indeed.

Surely this is finally it for Rumsfeld, right? There's no way he can stick around now after screwing up damned near everything he's been involved with for three and a half years, right?

It's a frightening thing that this is such a pathetically immoral White House that is so concerned with its political future that it would keep Rumsfeld the ghoul on only to avoid admitting what everyone knows by now: they've screwed the pooch a hundred different ways in Iraq.

W's Iraq policy has been an abysmal failure. Everyone knows that. It's time for W to quit playing politics with American lives and actually effing do something about it.