Comment Elsewhere: Soft-handed hypocrisy

In a discussion of the new Senate report on the failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora I wrote

Rumsfeld’s argument at the time, the report says, was that deploying too many American troops could jeopardize the mission by creating an anti-US backlash among the local populace.

I haven’t seen anyone point out the irony of this argument. If it’s sincere, it represents a bizarrely uncharacteristic soft-handed approach by an administration which routinely denigrated anyone who publicly suggested such a direction. I suppose you could just chalk that up to rank hypocrisy, which is plausible.

Or it could just be a smokescreen for incompetence. Either works.