Henny Penny Harridan - New York Times
The New York Times

August 5, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Henny Penny Harridan
By
MAUREEN DOWD

Washington

The enunciation of a clear sentence about the war in Iraq by Hillary Clinton
means that there must be an election coming up.

Until now, she has been unsubtly subtle about the most urgent issue facing
the country, sending signals rightward, sending signals leftward, tacking
here,
tacking there. Some days she seemed to be signaling whether she intended to
signal.

But now, suddenly, she's a woman of passion, a model of concerned clarity.
After an eon of calculated silence on most of the big moral questions of the
day, there is a calculated breaking of the silence. The enigma won't play
anymore. It's time for the drama.

But the drama played like "The Taming of the Shrew," with the only question
being, who was the shrew?

Hillary was trying to bring Rummy to heel, and Rummy was trying to exert
manly control over Hillary.

The junior senator from New York staged a drama in three acts, first sending
a letter summoning the reluctant Rummy to appear before the Armed Services
Committee; then hectoring him with a litany of his "numerous errors in
judgment"; and finally at the end of the day, like the Queen of Hearts,
delivering
her climactic demand for his head.

"I just don't understand why we can't get new leadership that would give us
a fighting chance to turn the situation around," Senator Clinton said after
the hearing, summing up a truth acknowledged by everyone except W. and Dick
Cheney, and particularly felt at the Pentagon, where the deeply unpopular
defense
chief has gone from self-styled matinee idol to self-destructing idle
martinet.

During the hearing, Hillary unmanned Rummy, as Shakespeare would say,
accusing him of incompetence, impotence and improbity.

"You did not go into Iraq with enough troops to establish law and order,''
she said. "You disbanded the entire Iraqi Army. Now we're trying to recreate
it. You did not do enough planning for what is called phase four and
rejected all the planning that had been done previously to maintain
stability after
the regime was overthrown. You underestimated the nature and strength of the
insurgency, the sectarian violence and the spread of Iranian influence."

She pointed out that the administration succeeds only in achieving the
opposite of its aims - with the number of American troops in Iraq scheduled
to increase,
not decrease, and the violence and instability spreading.

She cited the administration's reality disconnect on the Taliban in
Afghanistan, where every new claim of success has been followed by new
evidence of failure.
The Taliban have been written out of the war by administration flackery, but
they keep coming back like Mel Gibson's hangovers and apologies.

She tartly summed up: "Because of the administration's strategic blunders
and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding
over
a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we
believe your assurances now?"

There was a pause while Rummy summoned all the condescension he usually
reserves for doltish reporters.

"My goodness,'' he exhaled finally, firing off a defense that could have
been translated as: "Where do I start educating you on your utterly
superficial
understanding of the enemy, you harridan hippy-dippy Henny Penny?"

The Pentagon rank and file have tuned out Rummy, whose only transformation
so far has been to transform himself into a dangerous, deluded codger. But
when
the respected General Abizaid admitted that "it is possible that Iraq could
move towards civil war," it was clear Iraq was already in one. It opened up
a river of talk across the river about what people there had long been
afraid to say: that Rummy's jutting jaw is not going to cut it. There needs
to be
an alternative strategy to keep our kids from having to fight their way out
of a sectarian conflagration.

When Hillary and Rummy square off, it is a gladiatorial contest of two
masters at hauteur, self-righteousness, scriptedness, infighting and belief
in their
own manifest destiny.

Hillary wants to avoid Joe Lieberman's fate by arguing that how the
administration went about this war has caused all the problems, not that it
went to
a needless war she supported. Her stratagem avoids the lie that set off all
the other lies, and leaves Hillary risking a John Kerry problem, being both
for the war and against it.

It's going to be a tough triangulation. Even Bill never had to squirm his
way out of something as hard as this.

Posted by Miriam V.