November 09, 2006
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/
Had President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld a month ago, the Republican Party could have fared better last Tuesday—not much better, perhaps, but possibly well enough to retain control of both houses. Doing it late is nevertheless better than not doing it at all. Rumsfeld was a liability and an embarrassment, the embodiment of all that went wrong in Iraq. He disregarded sound military advice, ruled by intimidation, and made fundamental strategic mistakes.
Many staunch GOP loyalists would have liked to see Rumsfeld go in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal two and a half years ago, and last April it looked, briefly, as if they may get their wish. They realized that shifting some of the blame for Iraq on the architect-in-chief of the war was necessary to halt the freefall of Mr. Bush’s approval rating. Several retired generals fired their guns, but Rumsfeld’s war of words with former generals soon spread to the lower ranks, with recent veterans of the Iraq war and Pentagon civilians resorting to weblogs to attack their current and former bosses. Ret. General Anthony Zinni spoke for many active-duty comrades when he blasted Rumsfeld’s arrogance and his inability to devise a viable strategic plan. As recently as last Saturday the Army Times published a devastating editorial calling on Mr. Bush to fire Rumsfeld.
It is ironic that Rumsfeld’s departure will not be lamented even by his erstwhile neoconservative associates, who now claim that he is not one of them. Had they conducted the war, they now say, it would have ended, victoriously, a long time ago. Richard Perle et al, judging by a fascinating Vanity Fair feature, are way beyond asking “how to win?” They are moving on to “who screwed up?”—and the culprits are supposed to be in the White House and the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld’s betrayal by the Neocon Central is well deserved. He could not have not known that he was surrounding himself with riff-raff of dubious integrity and uncertain loyalty. In 2001 he made Richard Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board, the position which the latter had to resign in March 2003 after it was revealed that a venture capital firm in which Perle was managing partner would profit from the Iraqi war. Douglas Feith was crafting “intelligence” from whole cloth. The attitude of these people was evident in Paul Wolfowitz’s now famous Vanity Fair admission, that in seeking justification for war against Iraq “for bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” That surprisingly frank statement reflected a manipulative Straussian mindset that knows no restraint and no moral bounds.
As has been pointed out in this column some months before the war, Rumsfeld and his neocon team (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith) had long sought to construct an Iraqi pseudo-reality. They were among the founding members of the Project for a New American century (PNAC) established in 1997 and dedicated to “American global leadership.” In January 1998, in an open letter to President Clinton, PNAC said that the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use, or threaten to use, weapons of mass destruction. This theme was to be a mainstay of the group’s public speaking and private policy advocacy for years.
There was no proof, then or later, that Iraq had any WMD capability; but in 2002 that objection was discounted by Rumsfeld in a phrase worthy of Hegel: “the absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence.” In making the same point he could sound like a Beria, like when he asserted that the failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction “could be evidence, in and of itself [sic!], of Iraq’s noncooperation”; or like Descartes: his remark that “simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist” is a roundabout way of saying cogito ergo sum. (My favorite piece of Rumsfeldiana is a mix of Sartre and Groucho: “There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”)
Rumsfeld never repudiated his reasons for war. The intelligence that we were operating off was correct, he declared, and repeatedly expressed certainty “that we will, in fact, find weapons or evidence of weapons programs that are conclusive.” That did not happen, of course, and on the basis of that blunder alone Rumsfeld should have done the honorable thing, or Bush should have fired him back in 2003.
He was equally wrong in his often stated belief that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, and yet he appears to have believed his own assertion: his initial plans called for the reduction of forces to 30,000 U.S. troops within three months of the invasion. His assurances to Jim Lehrer of February 20, 2003, have a melancholy ring today: “There is no question but that they would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites.” He was also wrong in his expectation that a friendly government led by someone like Ahmad Chalabi would be able to take swift control, and that, faced with utter defeat, the fighting remnant of Saddam’s loyalists would surrender, assimilate, or be destroyed. Rumsfeld was not only wrong, he was seen to be wrong and “his critics within the Army have turned out to be right that this force would be too light to occupy, secure, and defend the country after the war.”
The deeper problem with Rumsfeld has less to do with Iraq than with his global vision. He remains an advocate of NATO expansion into Russia’s back yard, and he still favors the antimissile defense system whose assumptions are both politically and technically flawed. The 1999 “Rumsfeld Report” (of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States) stated that the system was needed because “a number of countries with regional ambitions do not welcome the U.S. role as a stabilizing power in their regions and . . . they want to place restraints on the U.S. capability to project power or influence into their regions.”
Eight years and three thousand American soldiers’ lives later the outgoing Secretary of Defense still doesn’t understand that to pursue global hegemony—for that’s what unrestrained projection of power is all about—will doom America. A strategic doctrine that demands the capacity to project power everywhere and all the time cannot be sustained either economically or physically, because the threat is limitless and open-ended by definition. No man who succumbs to this dangerous obsession should head the Pentagon.
Compared to Rumsfeld, Robert Gates will be a breath of fresh air. His appointment (he’ll be confirmed easily) heralds the approaching endgame in Iraq and the score-settling in Washington that, Andrew Bacevich says, promises to get downright ugly:
Still, whatever their political inclinations, Americans should welcome this debate. At a bare minimum, the eruption of blame and backstabbing will offer considerable entertainment value. To read [in Vanity Fair] that neoconservative David Frum, former White House speechwriter and author of a fawning tribute to Bush, has discovered that “the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas,” is simply a hoot. More substantively, the purging of political elites infesting Washington always has a cleansing effect. Figuring out “who lost Iraq?” ought to provide the occasion for throwing out more than a few rascals who hold office and discrediting others.
With Rumsfeld’s firing the Chistka is officially under way. Ladies and gentlemen, tighten the seat belts and have your sick bags ready.
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