Moon-owned paper features Bush-Rumsfeld conflict

RAW STORY
Published: Monday August 14, 2006

A report buried deeply in an April edition of the New Yorker--which claims it is an "open secret" in Washington that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants to exit Iraq--is being featured today as front page news in the Middle East Times, RAW STORY has learned.

The paper is published in Cairo, under the control of the Egyptian Ministry of Information.

The original story, "The Lesson of Tal Afar," by George Packer, appeared in the New Yorker on April 3, 2006. It discussed at length what the author characterized as failures of U.S. strategy in Iraq, the disastrous consequences of Donald Rumsfeld's refusal to acknowledge the existence of a broad-based insurgency, and the inadequacy of an approach based solely on killing or capturing as many insurgents as possible. And it warned:

Just as the Americans have begun to learn how to fight a counterinsurgency war, they find themselves in the middle of a growing civil conflict, and what succeeds in the former may backfire in the latter. Training Iraqi security forces and turning responsibility over to them makes sense if the Americans are trying to buttress an embattled government against insurgents; but, as sectarian violence rises, with the police and the Army dominated by one group, the Americans could also be arming one side of an approaching civil war.

The Middle East Times article, which calls this story "prescient," emphasizes one particular aspect of it -- conflict within the administration over Iraq -- and begins by quoting phrases from a paragraph near the end of the piece:

It’s an open secret in Washington that Rumsfeld wants to extricate himself from Iraq. But President Bush’s rhetoric--most recently, in a series of speeches given to shore up faltering public support--remains resolute. For three years, the Administration has split the difference between these two poles, committing itself halfheartedly to Iraq.

The Middle East Times is owned by News World Communications, an arm of the Unification Church headed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Its audience, at least for the online edition, appears to consist primarily of Americans. New World also owns and operates the conservative Washington Times.