Rumsfeld Pays the Price

With Donald Rumsfeld on the way out, I'm thinking back to something I wrote two years ago, at the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal:

What about accountability at the highest levels of the civilian bureaucracy for failures of leadership, management, training and discipline that have devastating consequences like those at Abu Ghraib? When you're really accountable, you pay the price. And when you're a political appointee, who serves at the pleasure of the president and is never guaranteed job security, the price is your job.