Once upon a time, a somewhat spinier President Bush gave SecDef Rumsfeld two assignments:

(1) Run a war
(2) Shake up the Pentagon's entrenched bureaucracy and Cold War thinking - replace it with a revolution in military affairs that would prepare the US military for an era of fighting either inferior armies from the air or shadowy militants in urban areas

The mistakes and faults that revolved around Rumsfeld's first assignment have been criticized incessently by unemployed DKos Kidz and Air American windbags - none of whom could tell an M-10 from their gas-guzzling SUV (or in the case of the DKos Kidz, the gas-guzzling SUV that their parents own and that they borrow).

What really got Rumsfeld into trouble was the second task that President Bush gave him. Shaking up the Pentagon, taking away generals' fiefdoms, cutting pet arms procurements - that's what bought him the resentment of generals. Many of those generals, in turn, started out slowly and petulantly - but soon found that they liked their new-found WaPo darling status. The drip drip drip of former generals kept Rumsfeld's name constantly in the press, until he was the visual representation of failure in Iraq.

So Rumsfeld retires after earning the animosity of the Pentagon because he tried to take it out of the Cold War. He spent his last six years trying to do that because that's what the President asked him to do, even though it earned him no gratitude and much resentment - creating a series of dynamics that ended up making him the fall guy for public disenchantment with the war. Presumably, the President wouldn't have put Rumsfeld in that position unless he firmly believed in the necessity of RMA.

So after Rumsfeld retires, who does the President appoint? Robert Gates, a former CIA director. And when did Gates work his way through the CIA? During the Cold War.

CNN tonight even went so far as to call him a Cold Warrior.

So one of three things is true:
(1) The President never believed that RMA was critical to US national security, and he had Rumsfeld earn the animosity of the entire military chain of command just because
(2) The President does believe that RMA is critical to US national security, and is serving the Democrat's Rumsfeld's head on a platter because... well, we actually don't know why
(3) The President did believe that RMA was critical to US national security, but Rumsfeld completed or nearly completed the shakeup. In which case the President is betraying a man who lost public and military support by doing what the President thought needed to be done

We don't really see a third alternative. Maybe if Gates wasn't a Cold Warrior of precisely the opposite sensibilities of Cheney and Rumsfeld the conclusions wouldn't be as inescabable. But Rumsfeld is hated in the Pentagon far more for RMA than Iraq, and now it looks like the President is giving up on RMA.