Quotes of the Morning: Dumbing Down Success

“To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks,”
-Donald Rumsfeld, December 5, 2005

“Honestly Mr. Rumsfeld, that isn’t how we define success. That is how we would define this as less than a miserable failure. Success would involve a Democratic Iraq with a rebuilt infrastructure and a working constitution guaranteeing human rights and equality in Iraq. To claim that success would just be a lack of terrorism is like saying that all of Shakespeare could be summed up in a single quote.”
-Skippy

“Out, damned spot! out, I say! -- One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't. -- Hell is murky! -- Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”
-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, William Shakespeare

“Actually I think that that quote sums up the Bush Administration’s attitude towards Iraq much better than it does Shakespeare’s writings..”
-Skippy

“Rumsfeld, speaking at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, delivered a blistering attack on the U.S. media, saying that in the present 24-hour news cycle, events in Iraq can be reported too quickly and without context.
He said there was a ‘jarring contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people.’ The Iraqi people and the U.S. military deployed in the country, he said, were optimistic about the progress of the war there.
‘Which view of Iraq is more accurate?’ Rumsfeld asked. ‘The pessimistic view of the so-called elites in our country or the more optimistic view of millions of Iraqis and some 155,000 U.S. troops on the ground?
‘A lie moves around the world at the speed of light,’ Rumsfeld said, ‘while truth is still trying to get its boots on.’ He referred to the recent story in the U.S. media that private contractors working for the U.S. military had paid Iraqi media outlets to carry optimistic stories about the war.
‘That story has been pounded in the media,’ Rumsfeld said. ‘We don't know what the facts are yet. The story goes out and we're still trying to find out what the facts are.’"
-Washington Post, December 5, 2005

“Yes, if we would just listen to the people in Iraq we’d see how well all of this is going.. Hey, we’ve heard from some of them before! Let’s check the wayback machine and see what they have to say..”
-Skippy

“Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein if not worse, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has said.
‘People are doing the same as (in) Saddam's time and worse,’ Allawi said in an interview published in Britain on Sunday.
‘It is an appropriate comparison,’ Allawi told The Observer newspaper. ‘People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’
[…]
[Allawi] added that he now had so little faith in the rule of law that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice, following the implication of police units in many of the abuses."
-CNN, November 27, 2005

“Seeking to quell the insurgency and sectarian violence, leaders of Iraq's sharply divided Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish political factions ended three days of contentious talks Monday with a call for a pullout of foreign troops from the country but no agreement on a timetable.
[…]
In Egypt, the communiqué's attempt to define terrorism omitted any reference to attacks against U.S. or Iraqi forces. Delegates from across the political and religious spectrum said the omission was intentional.
‘Though resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships,’ the document said.”
-Associated Press, November 22, 2005

“As the American military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.
Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.
Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.”
-New York Times, November 29, 2005

“Is anyone else troubled that we have a nutcase like Rumsfeld in charge of the Pentagon?”
-Skippy

“We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
-Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003