[Blarg]

I'm very close to your feeling on Tarantino vs. one more Leone.

Rumsfeld was a transparent failure as a secretary of defense before the war even started. "Just in time" is okay as a business way of maximizing your assets, but applying business precepts to war, you need to recognize the differences between business and war. Rumsfeld is the classic CEO who goes for the quarterly return while sinking the company. It was clearly unreasonable from the start to go in with so few soldiers, such stretched supply lines, and no plans to stabilize the conquered country. We don't fight wars that way for a reason that was completely apparent to the military. But Rumsfeld read a few too many books and magazine articles, and understood them too poorly and egotistically, on the way to corporatizing a war. The shareholders had no power to vote him out, but eventually it was clear they were going to vote out the guy who could vote HIM out. So before he could do the typical CEO thing and jump companies before taking the blame for crashing and burning them, he got crashed and burned himself. If secretaries of defense could do what CEO's do, he'd probably have gotten a job with Tony Blair and a gigantic golden parachute.

Your evaluation of him was easily one of the worst lapses of judgment of this type I've ever seen on 2+2. I wonder if you understand either Rumsfeld or his goals, frankly, in the slightest.