A Small Change In Plan

As government documents go, the QDR came wreathed in glamour, like a new novel from Tom Wolfe, grand and rare.

If you read closely in the barrage of weighty tomes they put out in recent days, you might discover that the Rumsfeld era is over, and Rumsfeld lost.

"The number of books translated by the whole Arab world over the past thousand years is equivalent to the numbers of books translated by Spain in one year."

Rumsfeld's Algeria Agenda: Arms Sales and Closer Ties

"They have things they desire, and we have things we can be helpful with."

"It's instructive for us to realize that the struggle we're in is not unlike the struggle that the people of Algeria went through."

Rumsfeld Jokes Ready to Run Horse Ranch

Ranch manager Amid Abdelhamid showed Rumsfeld such items as a saddle fashioned from crocodile skin and explained, among other things, the pros and cons of using frozen sperm to breed horses. He also told Rumsfeld of his travels searching to buy the world's best horses.

"You've got the best job in the world," Rumsfeld told Abdelhamid. "Any time you want to trade jobs, I'll do it."

"You're doin' a heckuva job, Rummy!"

Mr. Rumsfeld's Flawed Vision

Rumsfeld's Quadrennial Defense Review, delivered last week in sync with the Pentagon's budget proposal for fiscal 2007, is a disappointment. While it envisions a partial adjustment of the armed forces to what it calls "the long war," it dodges almost all the hard decisions that Mr. Rumsfeld should have made.

Rumsfeld merely bequeaths to his successor the tough decisions about weapons. One thing that military analysts agree on is that, even given the 40 percent increase in defense spending during the Bush administration -- including 7 percent for next year -- there will not be enough money to pay for the four dozen systems under development.

Max Boot on QDR and '07 Budget

The entire budget for language and cultural training -- $181 million -- comes to less than the cost of one F-35.

Attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and fighter aircraft may be glamorous, but they are almost entirely useless.

Miscalls on QDR

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide, with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life or we will succeed in changing theirs."

It would be difficult for war objectives to be stated in more maximalist terms. Either they will succeed in turning us into Taliban-style Muslims or we will turn them into happy consumers in globalism's Brave New World. Since most Americans would rather be dead than Talibans and most pious Muslims would rather perish than lose their souls to Brave New World, Rumsfeld has proclaimed a war of mutual annihilation. That will indeed be another Thirty Years' War, with little chance of a renewed Westphalian order as the outcome.