Intellectually bankrupt is just a really polite and very British way of saying

That Rumsfeld and Bush are fucking stupid:

Commentators in the US media have been suggesting for weeks that the British have failed in Iraq and are preparing to flee. Britain's Defence Secretary Des Browne and Foreign Secretary David Miliband took the unusual step of publishing an editorial in the Washington Post last week defending the UK's role in Iraq. "We believe we remain on track to complete the return of full sovereignty to the Iraqi people as planned," they wrote. "The United Kingdom is sticking to the mission we took on four years ago."

Then, over the weekend, two retired senior British officers upped the ante by lashing out at what they see as US incompetence in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Tim Cross, who was Britain's most senior officer involved in reconstruction efforts in Iraq, said he had talked to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the need to have international support and enough troops on the ground to reconstruct the country. "He didn't want to hear that message. The US had already convinced themselves that Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy," he told the Sunday Mirror. "Anybody who tried to tell them anything that challenged that idea -- they simply shut out."

His comments came a day after the Daily Telegraph quoted Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the British army during the invasion, describing Rumsfeld's policy as "intellectually bankrupt" and criticizing the Pentagon for discarding detailed plans drawn up by the State Deparment for post-conflict Iraq. "It was an ideological article of faith that the coalition soldiers would be accepted as a liberating army," he writes in his forthcoming autobiography which is being serialized by the newspaper.