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Rumsfeld departure shakes Bush administration
By Paul Reynolds World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website

President and Defence Secretary: parting company
The resignation of the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shows how much the Bush administration is in disarray about Iraq.
The president made it quite clear at a news conference after the election that he had decided beforehand that a "fresh perspective" was needed at the Pentagon.
This means that, win or lose the election, Mr Bush had decided that things were going badly enough to remove one of the architects of the war.
In fact, when Mr Bush told reporters last week that Mr Rumsfeld would be staying on, he had already spoken to Mr Rumsfeld about leaving. He said to the news conference that "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."
Whether Robert Gates, an ex CIA director, is the kind of man to provide much of a fresh perspective remains to be seen. Until now he has always been an establishment figure. But he seems to be about to be one of the pegs on which new hopes will be hung.
Significant moment
The departure of Donald Rumsfeld is a major moment in the history of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
Donald Rumsfeld felt himself to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time
Profile: Dinald Rumsfeld
In pictures: Rumsfeld's career His resignation is a sign and an admission that the policy in Iraq has not worked, so far.
Apart from Vice-President Dick Cheney and President Bush himself, there was nobody who symbolised the administration's determination to wage the war on terror and to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
"We know they have weapons of mass destruction," he announced of the Iraqis at one stage. "We don't need any debate about it." His confidence and brusque dismissal of dissent was typical. For some, it amounted to arrogance.
Ambitions
Rumsfeld brought to the Pentagon years of ambition to stir up a department he had run as a much younger man under President Ford.
The recent book about the administration at war by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, State of Denial, tells of the blizzard of handwritten memos known as "snowflakes" with which he bombarded his officials.
He was determined to break what he saw as the old guard and to get control of policy himself, which he felt was too much in the hands of the generals and admirals.
He wanted a slimmer, more mobile military, one more capable of waging war on international terrorists and governments that supported them and less concentrated on the massive weapons systems that were being developed as if the Cold War had not ended.
Donald Rumsfeld felt himself to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
His direct, irascible, sometimes even folksy style appealed to many when things were going well. His famous dictum about there being "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", made pre-Iraq, was seen as quirky and "Rummy" at his most idiosyncratic.
In a resignation appearance with President Bush and his own successor in the Oval Office, Mr Rumsfeld referred. almost as if he had not been appreciated, to "this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century... It is not well known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend."
Downfall
However the very confidence that allowed him to make his mark on the Pentagon also led to his downfall.
It became overconfidence.
He ignored warnings that his reliance on hard-hitting, relatively small units would win the ground war in Iraq but would not win a guerrilla war.
Like most US policymakers, he simply did not believe that Iraqis would not welcome the invaders and take care of events for themselves from then on.
He was not a man of patience and did not in the end have the necessary patience for a long drawn out counter insurgency war. Nor did he show the flexibility of tactics needed to demonstrate to his commander-in-chief that he was going to deliver the victory the president believes is so necessary.
He had to go, whatever the results of the elections.
Note created November 8, 2006BBC NEWS Americas Rumsfeld departure shakes Bush administration - news.bbc.co.uk/...
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Battle over gay marriage deepens
Thu Nov 9, 2006 2:54pm ET
By Jason Szep
BOSTON (Reuters) - Hundreds of protesters carrying placards, chanting slogans and singing rallied outside the Massachusetts statehouse on Thursday as lawmakers debated a state constitutional amendment that would give voters power to ban gay marriage.
Protesters on both sides of the debate gathered outside the gold-domed statehouse, with some waving signs reading "Let The People Vote." Gay rights activists sang songs and chanted slogans.
The latest developments in the divisive state-by-state battle over homosexual unions came two days after seven states voted to limit marriage to a man and a woman in ballot initiatives, effectively banning gay marriage.
Note created November 9, 2006
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Maha Nidal's voice is tinged with bitterness and sorrow as she looks around the campus courtyard at her fellow students milling around. The sight is a blend of Iraq's various religious sects --some girls in headscarves, others looking like they walked out of the pages of a fashion magazine.
"The future? The future is a dream. We only live in the now. There is no future," the 21-year-old student says.
This university, with its sprawling green campus, once was abuzz with activity. Now it is covered in the layer of grime and dust that seems to blanket all of Baghdad.
Like most of the students at Baghdad University, Maha lives in fear. But now, after the mass kidnapping at the Ministry of Higher Education this week, she lives not only in fear of the violence, but in fear of losing the one thing that will determine her future -- her education. (Watch Maha describe the lack of hope Iraqi students have -- 2:17 )
When she heard that the education ministry was thinking of shutting down the university, her world -- already shattered -- crumbled.
"You can't imagine what we felt, I saw our future destroyed," she says. "How do you know that a future of a country ... has been destroyed? It's when there is no justice, no security, and no education, if you reach the stage of no studies and no education. And when you lose that, that's it, the people are finished.
"There is no future."
With frustration reverberating in her voice, her cousin, 19-year-old Afraa adds, "Each day it just gets worse. Like last year we had maybe 50 percent hope, but now nothing, it's zero percent. There is nothing that is happening that makes us think, yes, they [the government] are doing something."
The two girls live in the same home now. Afraa's family fled sectarian violence in a violent western Baghdad neighborhood and moved in with Maha's family. The two girls are like many here, hungry for an education, showing up each day despite the risks and their families' protests, and hoping that their classes will be in session.
Maha, in her headscarf, is the more conservative of the two, but the more talkative. She says that sometimes she is simply just overcome with anger.
"I want to continue on to get my masters," she says. "I have good grades; I am in the top 10 of my class, but now what am I supposed to do?"
The university is all that these girls and others have left. The streets outside are petrifying. They don't go out, even the simplest thing like walking in the street, grabbing a cup of coffee with friends, shopping, the things that most university students do without a thought in other parts of the world, are impossible here.
Their world is one of gunfire, explosions, concertina wire, blast walls and uncertainty.
"We don't know if we will be alive the next minute," Maha says.
The university, even after the mass kidnapping, provides little in terms of actual security. Most of the guards are students themselves. The ministry and the university have asked the government for additional security, but the girls have no delusions that their government is going to come through for them.
"They can't do anything," Afraa says. "Because if they could, they would have done it from the start. But they are too obsessed with themselves."
Maha is harsher.
"They say that they can't provide security for teachers and students," she laments. "Well then, how is it that they can provide security for themselves? They each have hundreds of guards surrounding them."
One does not have to look further than the empty hallways and deserted classrooms to see the toll that the violence is taking on Iraq's educated moderate minds. The students say that on a good day, 40 percent of their classmates show up. More often than not, their professors are not around. Most of the senior professors have fled the country or have been killed.
"The head of my department was killed last year," Maha says. "Gunmen came to his house and killed him. And that was hard for us. He was like one of the students; he kept us strong."
He also gave her hope.
Many of the students here are aware that extremist elements want to divide Iraqi society and drive out secular moderates.
"This is what they want -- the gunmen, the terrorists, any force right now with its hands in destruction wants this -- no education," Maha says. "No learning, no future, for ignorance to rule so that they can have control."
The impact of the academic destruction, as one Iraqi education official put it, could kill this struggling nation.
Note created November 16, 2006Iraqi students fear death of education system - CNN.com - www.cnn.com/...
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