"Don Rumsfeld, a thinking man's secretary of Defense."

On Iraq, he doesn't have anything to say about the controversies swirling around Ahmed Chalabi. I ask how the Iraqis forces were performing in the fight against Moqtada al-Sadr. He launches into a long explanation of the makeup of the Iraqi forces — so long, in fact, that I have to ask a follow-up to get back to my original question and he admits that he has been "rambling" (score one for the journalists!). Basically, he says original figures for the numbers of Iraqis security forces were exaggerated since they included retirees and others who are inactive. He says the key to understanding the performance of the forces that are there (about 110,000) is that they have different training and capabilities. So lightly armed police might not perform so well against Sadr's militia, since that's not what they're there for. But the Iraqi counterintelligence units have been performing much better. According to Rumsfeld, reports on patrols in Iraq come in every day and more and more of them involve joint patrols with the Iraqis, and the goal obviously is slowly to move to them being solely Iraqi. Rumsfeld takes encouragement from the fact that, despite being targeted by the insurgents, Iraqis are "lining up to be recruited, volunteering for these positions."

Of course.