Rumsfeld's Happy Face Masks Deep Problems

Journalist Joseph L. Galloway, the military affairs correspondent for Knight Ridder, criticized the Bush administration's war fighting plan today on NPR's Fresh Air program. Galloway, the co-author of We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, was recently a consultant to Colin Powell. Yesterday Galloway reported that "the risks of the [Iraq] campaign are becoming increasingly apparent, and ... there may be a mismatch between Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's strategy and the force he has sent to carry it out. ... Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Hussein once the Americans attacked." The Washington Post reports that "the war is likely to last months ... senior defense officials said today." (Our Disinfopedia analysis warned before the war started of the danger of the Bush administration believing its own propaganda.)