RUMSFELD: DIFFERENT THINGS ARE DIFFERENT. Via Andrew Sullivan, Don Rumsfeld gets asked whether or not Iraq is close to a civil war and replies, "You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different."
And, indeed, it is rather different. There are no cavalry commanders in Iraq and there were no car bombs during the Civil War. For that matter, the Russian Civil War was a whole different thing as well -- it got really, really cold and one side was full of Communists. Seriously, what's wrong with this guy? One shudders to think of the tens of thousands of American soldiers deployed in Iraq and serving under the command of a political leadership that has no idea what's going on.
--Matthew Yglesias
