IF ONLY THEY'D PULL UP THEIR SOCKS: Gosh darnit, those Iraqis just won't do it

By now you'd have to have been living in a cement bunker on the moon to have missed the media repeating one of the Don Rumsefeld mantras, included in his recent exit memo, on options to ameliorate the complete disaster called the war in Iraq.

Google news tab shows it repeated dozens of times.

For example: "Mr. Rumsfeld’s tardy list of policy options included at least one potentially useful suggestion. The U.S. might just start to pull out some troops, he wrote, 'so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.'"

This from Joe Conason writing in the New York Observer.

A useful suggestion?

How about a convenient slogan.

With GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow T-shirt on, DD went rifling through the published wisdom of Don Rumsfeld, hypothesizing that "pull up their socks" was just the kind of eat-your-peas-says-pappa bromide that would appeal to the man as handy rhetoric. And that he must have used it before the handy exit memo.

On October 2, Rumsfeld, perhaps mentally preparing the exit memo, said to Bob Woodward, in a Department of Defense transcript of a lengthy discussion between the two.

"My whole approach has been, as I've said here, that it is their country. They're going to have to run it. We're going to have to take our hands off the bicycle seat, and we have to try to do it in a way that we find a great balance so that they can pull up their socks, grab their country, make a go of it, and we will not create a dependency and we will not feed the insurgency. And John Abizaid and I have been very much in agreement with it and the president . . . "

And in June, in a long speech at a International Institute for Strategic Studies Conference in Singapore:

"We don't intend to stay there and take the Iraqi oil, which is what the argument is. We don't intend to occupy that country for any period of time. Our troops would like to go home. And they will go home. And they'll go home at a pace when we're able, along with our friends and allies in the coalition, to pass off responsibility to the Iraqi security forces so that they can pull up their socks and take responsibility for their own country, which is what they're going to have to do. It will be the Iraqi people that will suppress that insurgency, not the coalition forces, and not foreign forces. But the short answer is yes, I am concerned. When there's broad support, everything is easy; when there's broad opposition, everything is hard. And simply because things are hard doesn't mean that you need to toss in the towel, however, I would add."

Yes, if only the Iraqis would pull up their socks and fight for freedom. That would do it, don't you think?

Perhaps Rumsfeld liked the phrase when Vice President Dick Cheney used it to brace the polity for war hardship at a Republican rally/town hall meeting in Wisconsin in September of 2004.

"When you think about the challenges this nation has surmounted over the years, this is a war we can win. There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever. But we have to recognize we are engaged in a war. There's an adversary out there that will do everything they can to get us. And what we need to do is to pull up our socks and support the kind of strong policies we need in order to make certain that over the long term we can pass on the nation to our kids and grandkids safer and more secure than we found it.

In any case, it is a prescription Democrats like, too.

From the Los Angeles Times, today, on the Senate/Gates hearing:

". . . when asked by [Carl] Levin whether he would consider beginning to withdraw troops 'so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country,' Gates replied, 'Yes, sir.' "

Hey Iraq, pull up your socks, dadgummit!