Shoot straight you bastards -- don’t make a mess of it

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. -- Matthew 10:36

Rumsfeld, Bremer, and Sanchez meet with reporters at Camp Victory, Fall 2003

Rumsfeld: There’s so much reporting about Baghdad and so little about what’s taking place in the rest of the country…. I feel that the progress in four or five months is breathtaking.

Bremer: Mr. Secretary, I would just add a little more on the point you made about the good news. Every day in this country there are dozens of success stories.

Democracy is on the march in this country.

Rumsfeld: And if you think about it, it happened in four or five months. Four or five months. Not four or five years. Four or five months. If one looks back at Germany, at Japan, at Bosnia or Kosovo, and measures the progress that’s taken place in this country in four or five months, it dwarfs any other experience that I’m aware of.

Sanchez: Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. It is very disturbing for me when I sit here every day and watch the news back home that focuses on the bad things that are occurring in Iraq, and I see my soldiers that have suffered either wounds or have gotten killed, and we’re not paying the right credit to their sacrifices….

We need to capture the great news out there and make sure that America knows what her sons and daughters are doing and what the rest of the international community is doing here.

From Thomas Ricks‘s Fiasco, pages 243-244.
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Matthew 10:36 epitaph and shoot-straight quote from the heart-breaking “This is what comes of Empire building” sequence of Breaker Morant (view video clip here).