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Rumsfeld's PreWar Memo
Washington Post
Wrestling With History
By David Von Drehle
November 13, 2005
If only he could show us the memo.
"It's still classified, I suppose?" says Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld, looking toward his assistant.
"It's still classified," Lawrence DiRita replies, "along with a lot of the
underlying planning."
Rumsfeld nods, apparently disappointed. He is interested in sharing the memo
because the memo, as he outlines it, demonstrates that his critics are utterly
mistaken. He did not dash heedless and underprepared into Iraq. Rumsfeld
foresaw the things that could go wrong -- and not just foresaw them, but wrote
them up in a classically Rumsfeldian list, one brisk bullet point after
another, 29 potential pitfalls in all. Then he distributed the memo at the
highest levels, fed it into the super-secret planning process and personally
walked the president through the warnings.
"It would have been probably October of '02, and the war was March, I
think," of the following year, Rumsfeld explains. "I sat down, and I said,
'What are all the things that one has to anticipate could be a problem?' And
circulated it and read it to the president -- sent it to the president. Gave it
to the people in the department, and they planned against those things. And all
of the likely and unlikely things that one could imagine are listed there. It
was just on the off-chance we'd end up having a conflict. We didn't know at
that stage."
Some might quibble with Rumsfeld's description of the historical moment. At
the time he wrote the memo, dated October 15, 2002, Congress had recently voted
to give President Bush complete authority to invade Iraq and topple Saddam
Hussein. A White House spokesman had just confirmed that invasion plans were on
Bush's desk -- detailed plans, we now know, which Rumsfeld had been shaping and
hammering and editing for much of the previous year.
In other words, there was far more than an "off-chance" of conflict. All
that remained to be done was for the president to reach his official decision.
The train was loaded, its doors were shut, and it was ready to leave the
station.
Rumsfeld never pretended there was anything off-chancy about the timing of
the memo when he discussed it with Bob Woodward, who wrote about the document
in his authoritative history of Iraq war preparations, Plan of Attack. In that
account, Rumsfeld portrayed the memo as a warning blast, an attempt to do
"everything humanly possible to prepare" Bush for the awful responsibility that
had settled onto his presidential shoulders -- and his shoulders alone. For
there comes a point when even the secretary of defense must realize that "it's
not your decision or even your recommendation," Rumsfeld reflected with
Woodward. By which he meant the Iraq war wasn't Don Rumsfeld's decision or
recommendation.
As if to underline the point, Rumsfeld also told Woodward that he couldn't
recall a moment, in all the months of planning for the war, when Bush asked
whether his defense secretary favored the invasion. Nor did Rumsfeld ever
volunteer his opinion. ("There's no question in anyone's mind but I agreed with
the president's approach," he added.) So what was in the memo? Dire scenarios
ranging from disasters that did not happen, such as chemical warfare and
house-to-house combat with Saddam's troops in Baghdad, to bad things that have
indeed come to pass, such as ethnic strife among Iraq's religious factions and
the successful exploitation of the war as a public relations vehicle for the
enemies of the United States.
Rumsfeld raises the subject of this memo near the end of an interview in his
spacious Pentagon office. Outside the tinted blast-proof windows and across the
Potomac, a brutal summer sun bakes the domes and cornices of Washington, but
Rumsfeld is wearing a fleece vest over his shirtsleeves. He often finds his
office chilly. Rumsfeld appears relaxed, charming, expansive. It seems awfully
helpful of him to want to share a classified memo written expressly for the
president of the United States, who was wrestling with his awesome power to
wage war.
But then you wonder: Why did Rumsfeld write that memo, at that moment, and
why is he flagging it now?
If the point of the memo was to nudge George W. Bush's hand from the
throttle of the engine, to halt the train of events at the last moment, then it
was too little too late. Rumsfeld would have known this after 40 years inside
the sanctums of government. Plans have a way of gathering momentum as surely as
boulders running downhill. One of "Rumsfeld's Rules," the booklet of maxims and
tenets he has coined and updated through his lifetime in management, notes that
"it is easier to get into something than to get out of it." The time to stop an
idea is before it gets moving.
And if his purpose was to spur adequate thinking and preparation for the
complexity of the Iraq mission, he failed. Military experts and strategic
thinkers differ over whether the insurgency in Iraq can be quelled and a
legitimate government stabilized on a timeline and a budget that the American
people will support. Will it turn out to be "the greatest strategic disaster in
our history," as retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, the Army's chief of
intelligence and director of the National Security Agency during the Reagan
administration, recently asserted? Or will it someday be seen as "a hard
struggle" toward an eventual victory, albeit a struggle through "the crucible
with the blood and the dust and the gore," as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Gen. Richard Myers said in his final congressional testimony in September
before retiring? Myers acknowledged that "we've made lots of mistakes along the
way." But, he said, that was because "we are trying to do in Iraq what has
never been done before."
But there is broad agreement now that if the United States salvages a
victory in Iraq, it will come in spite of the initial war planning, not because
of it. Rumsfeld's own advisory think tank, the Defense Science Board, took a
long look at this issue last year and concluded that the architects of the Iraq
war -- led by Rumsfeld -- lacked necessary knowledge of Iraq and its people,
and that they failed to factor in well-known lessons of history.
"It is clear that Americans who waged the war and who have attempted to mold
the aftermath have had no clear idea of the framework that has molded the
personalities and attitudes of Iraqis," the board declared in a report bearing
the official seal of the Department of Defense. "It might help if Americans and
their leaders were to show less arrogance and more understanding of themselves
and their place in history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans
display a consistent amnesia concerning their own past, as well as the history
of those around them."
Maybe Rumsfeld's memo was written not just for its moment, but also for the
future, as proof that he remained sober even in an atmosphere of
neoconservative enthusiasm for the war. Although classified, the memo keeps
surfacing in this context, always putting a little distance between Rumsfeld
and the audacious gamble in Iraq. Five weeks before the invasion, as others
were promising a cakewalk, Rumsfeld and his memo surfaced in the New York
Times. It surfaced again with Woodward. And now here it is again.
This subtle distancing explains why the memo has joined other actions and
inactions, statements and omissions as evidence, for some of the Iraq war's
strongest supporters, that the man atop the Pentagon, despite his bravura, may
not have had his whole heart in this war.
The idea may not be immediately obvious to Americans at their dinner tables
-- that Donald Rumsfeld, the chesty, confident, competent "Rumstud" of the Iraq
invasion briefing room, has held something back from the war effort. He was,
after all, the public face of "shock and awe." He seemed to thrive on the
glare, the pressure, the workload of war, at his desk daily by 6:30 a.m. and
dictating his notorious "snowflake" memos -- the waves of questions and orders
and ruminations that swirl through Rumsfeld's Pentagon like a blizzard -- long
into the night. He dominated news briefings and congressional hearings like a
tank rolling through small-arms fire, and he gloried in the hand-wringing of
weaker souls. Behind the scenes, Rumsfeld and his civilian staff bulldozed
skeptical generals and smashed rival bureaucracies in the planning and
execution of the invasion.
So when William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative magazine the Weekly
Standard and a leading proponent of the Iraq war, charged Rumsfeld with
insufficient commitment in August, Rumsfeld's assistant fired back with
confidence. "Kristol thinks that he senses the 'inescapable whiff of weakness
and defeatism' in the leadership of the Pentagon," DiRita wrote. "This is
nonsense."
But Kristol remains unpersuaded. "I don't think he ever really had his heart
in it," he says. And this is interesting, because one of the main reasons why
antiwar critics have included Rumsfeld among the fervent forces behind the war
is that he signed a letter in 1998 calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein --
a letter written by Kristol. "He had nothing to do with making it happen,"
Kristol says of Rumsfeld. "We just faxed it to him, as one of the usual
suspects, and a few days later they faxed back his signature."
The crux of the complaint against the secretary is this: Whenever Rumsfeld
has faced a choice between doing more in Iraq or doing less, he has done less.
When, during the pre-invasion planning, the State Department sent a team of
Iraq experts to the Pentagon to help prepare a major reconstruction effort for
the aftermath, Rumsfeld turned some of them away. As a result, "there was
simply no plan, other than humanitarian assistance and a few other things like
protection of oil and so forth, with regard to postwar Iraq. There was no
plan," retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former secretary of
state Colin Powell, explained in a recent speech.
When Army generals called for more troops to occupy the
soon-to-be-leaderless country, Rumsfeld pushed for fewer. He cut the time for
training National Guard units, including the ones that wound up photographing
themselves with naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. (He twice offered his
resignation when the prison scandal broke. Bush declined.) He blessed plans to
begin pulling the invasion force out of Iraq almost as quickly as it went
in.
The thread running through all these decisions is Rumsfeld's steady
resistance to a long, troop-intensive effort in Iraq. A big part of his job, he
explained that day in his office, is to "balance" the resources being poured
into Iraq against necessary investments in a transformed, high-tech military
force of the future. When senators tell Rumsfeld, as they did again in
September, that the United States should have enough troops on the border
between Iraq and Syria to cut off the flow of money and manpower to the
anti-U.S. insurgency, one can imagine the secretary running through the math.
Today's highly skilled volunteer troops don't come as cheaply as the draft-age
cannon fodder of wars gone by. With pay, training and benefits, each soldier or
Marine sent to secure that border would mean an annual debit of up to $100,000
in defense budgets for years to come. Ten thousand soldiers equals $1 billion.
Not counting their guns, ammo, food, uniforms, armor, vehicles.
Which may be why Rumsfeld's military, as of late September, had assigned
just 1,000 Marines to cover the western half of the 376-mile border with Syria.
Picture five major college marching bands stretched over the distance between
Washington and Trenton, N.J.
Doubts about Rumsfeld's priorities have been widespread in Iraq almost from
the beginning. Soldiers wondered why they were doing heavy-armor fighting in
unarmored trucks. Commanders scratched their heads when Rumsfeld insisted, at a
Pentagon news briefing in 2003, that the ongoing war outside their windows
wasn't "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." Kurdish
leaders, concerned about a Pentagon cut-and-run, declined to disband their
ethnic militias. "They say, 'Put a permanent U.S. base up here and we'll be
glad to,'" one Kurdish representative explains.
Such questions took root in Washington a bit later, however. A turning point
came in September 2004, with a pair of columns written by the well-sourced
conservative Robert Novak. Many pro-war insiders believed that Rumsfeld was the
origin of Novak's startling declaration that "inside the Bush administration
policymaking apparatus, there is a strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave
Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting
Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying, Ready
or not, here we go." Bush quickly shot down the trial balloon, but Novak stood
fast, pointedly boasting in a follow-up piece that Rumsfeld had not repudiated
the original column.
West Point military historian Frederick Kagan soon published a scathing
assessment of Rumsfeld's war leadership. A supporter of the decision to invade
Iraq, Kagan was appalled that Rumsfeld had not shifted his fabled intensity
from visions of future warfare to the burgeoning war of today. "The secretary
of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America's military for future
conventional conflict rather than for the current mission," Kagan wrote in
Kristol's magazine. "In no previous American war has the chief of the military
administration refused to focus on the war at hand." Defenders rose to
Rumsfeld's side. The venerable conservative magazine National Review, while
critical of Rumsfeld for underestimating the "magnitude of the task that
rebuilding and occupying Iraq would present," opened its pages to rebuttals of
Kristol's neocon journal. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution chalked
up America's troubles in Iraq to the huge cuts in active-duty troops that were
begun by the first President Bush and continued under President Clinton. "In
reality, [Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to
spare elsewhere -- and all for reasons beyond his control," Hanson argued.
Others praised Rumsfeld's creativity in squeezing the most from existing
troop levels by moving uniformed soldiers and officers out of jobs that
civilians could fill instead. Some writers and politicians who could find
little to praise in Rumsfeld's handling of post-invasion Iraq nevertheless
hailed his willingness to cut outmoded weapons programs and shift forces away
from Cold War bases.
"Mr. Rumsfeld, standing on his remarkable record of achievement, is far too
effective a defense secretary for any serious student of recent American
history to think that he should be replaced," former House speaker Newt
Gingrich summed up in the Baltimore Sun.
The man himself seems impervious to these storms. As Rumsfeld reflected on
his eventful tenure from an armchair near his big desk last summer, the most
striking thing about him was how upbeat he appeared to be. Public support for
the Iraq war was plunging. Criticism of him was spreading among the military
brass and through Congress. Learned essays were circulating through war
colleges and think tanks describing an Army near the breaking point under the
pressure of the war -- equipment wearing out 15 times faster than anticipated,
the divorce rate among officers tripled. Yet Rumsfeld radiated good cheer as he
described his invigorating tussles with a Pentagon bureaucracy that is, by his
reckoning, not much advanced beyond inkwells and steam.
His staff reflects that sunny superiority. "The ramparts of Washington are
littered with the bleached bones of people who said Donald Rumsfeld was not
going to survive," DiRita says happily. Rumsfeld's serenity comes from a
distinctive blend of freshness and age. DiRita describes his boss as thirsty
for new knowledge and also supremely confident in himself, able to make tough
decisions without fretting or second-guessing. "He is always looking forward.
He has a sense of himself, and the president likes that," the assistant says.
"When you know who you are, you're pretty comfortable with the scrutiny that
comes from public service."
At 73, Rumsfeld is the oldest person ever to run the Pentagon, having also
been the youngest when he was appointed for his first tour in 1975. Yet, apart
from a slight hearing loss that can seem to wax or wane depending on whether he
likes what he is hearing, he bears little sign of age. His back is straight,
eyes are clear, body is lean, mind is sharp, and he enjoys whipping much
younger men in his afternoon squash matches. Only two secretaries of defense
have served longer -- Robert McNamara in the 1960s and Caspar Weinberger in the
1980s -- and Rumsfeld shows no sign of flagging.
If only he could have had the war he wanted, instead of the war he got.
Rumsfeld hoped and intended that Iraq would be a proving ground for his
theories about a new era of warfare -- fast, light, "agile," high-tech and
overwhelming. Instead, Iraq is an old-fashioned war, hot and dusty, of foot
soldiers, fortified camps, checkpoints and armor. Rumsfeld stubbornly clung to
his hope even after most others had faced reality. The CIA concluded by June
2003, two months after the liberation of Baghdad, that the United States was
facing a "classic insurgency," but Rumsfeld specifically denied it until he was
publicly corrected by his able commander, Army Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid.
Perhaps this is understandable, because the implications of the insurgency
-- namely, a long, expensive military and political commitment -- were
potentially ruinous for Rumsfeld's larger, futuristic agenda. But the
reluctance of the man at the top of the Pentagon to come to grips with the
reality on the ground had an impact, according to retired Army Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, who surveyed Iraq last summer and reported on his findings to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
McCaffrey did not mention the secretary of defense by name in his report.
But his terse, grim recounting of America's first 22 months in Iraq led
directly to Rumsfeld's door.
"The enterprise was badly launched," McCaffrey wrote. The U.S. invasion
"left a nation without an operational State." Rumsfeld's "overwhelmed,
under-resourced" appointees were feckless in filling that void. Mistakes were
made with alacrity, but effective corrections seemed to take forever. A year
passed before the United States began serious and effective training of new
security forces for Iraq -- indeed, the United States transferred sovereignty
to a provisional Iraqi government in June 2004 without any competent Iraqi
military or police units to defend that government. In the meantime, Iraq
devolved into "a weak state of warring factions."
No student of history should have been surprised by the insurgency. For
centuries, guerrilla tactics have been the preferred strategy of the outgunned
and outsoldiered, because insurgency offers a way of winning a war without
having to conquer a superior army. Like mosquitoes ruining a picnic, insurgents
patiently sap the superior army's will to hold a city, province or country.
Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Operations officer and adviser to U.S. commanders
in Iraq, published an influential essay last spring in Military Review, an
official Army publication, in which he identified more than 50 insurgencies
around the world during the past century, ranging from the second Boer War in
South Africa to the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines to the ongoing
Russian campaign in Chechnya. Other writers have traced the history of
insurgency to the Roman Empire.
After much wheel-spinning, lessons drawn from those examples are finally
shaping the U.S. approach in Iraq. "We've crafted a strategy for success in
Iraq based on historical lessons [and] counterinsurgency principles," Iraq
commander Gen. George Casey recently testified before Congress. This strategy,
Casey said, calls for an effort more political than military, precisely the
sort of "nation-building" once scorned by Rumsfeld and Bush. The goal is to
"enable the Iraqis to take charge of their future." Ordinary Iraqis won't fully
turn against the insurgents until they can rely on a competent government to
meet basic human needs -- for safety, economic opportunity, reliable
infrastructure and so on.
Counterinsurgency is a matter of turning on the air conditioning and keeping
it on. Of guaranteeing Iraqis that they can take a government job without fear
that their children will be kidnapped as punishment. It is a question not just
of sweeping the insurgents from Samarra or Fallujah or Ramadi, but of keeping
such cities safe for the long run. The average counterinsurgency effort lasts
nine years, Casey informed Congress, "and there's no reason that we should
believe that the insurgency in Iraq will take any less time to deal with."
McCaffrey concluded after his visit that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have
indeed landed on the right strategy and are finally making progress. Credit, he
said, belongs to the "superb" senior generals who took over after the chaotic
first months, and to the soldiers and Marines comprising "the most competent
and battle-wise force in our nation's history." His silence concerning civilian
leadership of the Pentagon spoke volumes.
Rumsfeld's support continues to dwindle. He has alienated a fair percentage
of America's officer corps, though few of them will say so on the record. The
boss pays meticulous attention to the selection and promotion of new generals,
"constantly scanning the bench: who's coming up," says his assistant, DiRita.
Focusing on personnel is a way of putting his lasting stamp on military
culture, Rumsfeld believes. It also has the effect of reminding officers that
he is watching them carefully.
Nevertheless, the brass has ways of making itself heard. Opinions are
expressed to trusted friends, retired comrades, veteran reporters. The tone of
that feedback has become so negative that even some pro-Rumsfeld analysts now
doubt his effectiveness. Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Reagan-era Pentagon
official, is a good example: In his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column, Kelly
recently called for Rumsfeld to resign, even though in many ways he "has been a
terrific secretary of defense . . . Army officers think Rumsfeld has it in for
them," Kelly wrote. "I don't think that is true. But when a perception is as
widespread as this one is, it becomes a reality."
Another well-connected conservative, Loren Thompson of the Lexington
Institute, once regarded Rumsfeld as "the most persuasive proponent of the Bush
Administration's muscular approach to global security." Now: "From the disarray
of 9/11 to the decay of the Western alliance to the debacle of the Iraq
occupation to the disorg-anized oversight of Pentagon procurement, Rumsfeld has
served the president badly."
Then there's Congress. The secretary has always had a prickly relationship
with Congress, which he and most defense analysts regard as too protective of
obsolete military bases and big-ticket weapons. When Rumsfeld returned to the
Pentagon in 2001 after 24 years away, he was shocked to see the extent of
congressional nitpicking and micromanaging. "The number of congressional
staffers [devoted to Pentagon issues] had doubled from something like 8,000 to
. . . something like 16,000," he marveled. Those staffers demand hundreds of
annual reports on a stupefying array of topics, he complained, many of marginal
value. "There's so many hands on the steering wheel."
Rumsfeld did a bad job of masking his feelings. As his friend of more than
40 years, Nixon-era defense secretary Melvin Laird, complained recently in
Foreign Affairs magazine, Rumsfeld's "overconfident and self-assured style on
every issue . . . did not play well with Congress." He warned that this "sour
relationship on Capitol Hill could doom the whole [Iraq] effort."
Lately, though, the Republican-controlled Congress has gone past pestering
to near repudiation of the secretary. Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the
Armed Services Committee, recently returned from Iraq dismayed by the sorry
state of the country's infrastructure, 2 1/2 years and an ocean of money after
the U.S. arrival. He concluded that "the secretary of defense . . . was not, in
my judgment, showing the strength and decisiveness that is needed at this
time."
As a further rebuke, Warner joined most of the Senate Republicans and all of
the Democrats in approving an amendment, 90-to-9, that would require clear
rules for the treatment of enemy prisoners under Rumsfeld's jurisdiction.
This scolding of the administration was sponsored by Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) -- which only underlined how irritated many senators have become. A
high-profile bill that might advance the fortunes of McCain? There are few
things conservative Republicans dislike more.
Rumsfeld, apparently, is one.
Why Rumsfeld, one of the smartest, most energetic and most forceful men to
serve as secretary of defense, has reached this point is one of the deep
riddles of today's Washington. The search for an explanation unfolds through
scores of essays and articles, thousands of pages of briefing transcripts and
congressional testimony, reams of Pentagon documents and hours of interviews
with Rumsfeld watchers inside and outside the military. Few of these interviews
could be conducted on the record, because Rumsfeld continues to exert
significant control over promotions of those in uniform, and wields influence
over Department of Defense contracts with the institutions that employ many
outside experts.
Moreover, the war in Iraq has been intensely politicized, to the point that
a number of people who agreed to discuss Rumsfeld would not speak on the record
because they worried that their assessments would be attacked as politically
motivated.
This inquiry also included, at an early stage, an interview with Rumsfeld,
in which he was asked to sum up, in general terms, his broad agenda of the past
five years. At the end of that conversation, he smiled and said, "Ask me
something harder." But repeated requests for a second meeting to pose specific
follow-up questions were unavailing. An e-mail containing specific questions
was sent to DiRita last month, but neither he nor Rumsfeld responded.
So, return to the beginning: Iraq was not Rumsfeld's decision, nor did he
ever formally recommend the invasion. It is not "Rumsfeld's war." His assistant
is emphatic on this point. "No. It is America's war," DiRita says.
When Bush drew a bead on Iraq late in 2001, as U.S. forces and allies were
taking control of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld was already deeply involved in two wars
much closer to home. One was his campaign to remake the Pentagon for the 21st
century. The other was a bureaucratic battle with then-Secretary of State
Powell. It is impossible to understand Rumsfeld's approach to Iraq outside the
context of these earlier, ongoing fights.
First, the war with Colin Powell.
The bitter lawsuits over the 2000 presidential election left Bush under
enormous pressure as he chose his first Cabinet. Time was short and the country
divided. Bush turned to Powell, a figure so broadly popular that he had been
approached about running for vice president by both the Republicans and the
Democrats. Powell had foreign policy acumen, military experience and the
assurance that comes from years in command -- all areas in which Bush could use
a boost.
Still, Powell's prominence and his
politics "raised anxieties" among some important members of the president's
inner circle, as journalist James Mann explained in Rise of the Vulcans, his
intellectual history of the Bush national security team. The general angered
conservatives by favoring affirmative action and abortion rights. And he
worried hawks with his Powell Doctrine for war-fighting -- it was much too
cautious, they felt.
One of those conservative hawks was Vice President Cheney, whose differences
with Powell went back a decade to the first Gulf War. Then, Powell was chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Cheney was secretary of defense. Powell tried
an end run around Cheney to appeal directly to President George H.W. Bush not
to wage war against Iraq. When Cheney discovered Powell's maneuver, he ordered
the general to "stick to military matters." Still, Powell succeeded in shaping
the Gulf War
strategy according to his principles of decisive force and a clear postwar
exit strategy.
This political and personal baggage carried into the new Bush
administration. "The overriding dynamic of the Bush foreign policy team," Mann
wrote, was an "intense, continuing desire . . . to limit the power and
influence of Colin Powell." Job One was to cut off Powell's sway at the
Pentagon, an institution he knew as intimately as anyone in government. Cheney
and Bush turned to Rumsfeld, Cheney's longtime mentor and pal. Their
partnership went back to the Nixon administration, when a young Don Rumsfeld
gave an even younger Dick Cheney his first job in the executive branch.
Few men of the past half-century were better suited to intramural
bureaucratic combat than Rumsfeld. As a Princeton wrestling champion in the
1950s, his specialty was taking down opponents, an art rooted in quickness,
leverage and a ruthless eye for vulnerabilities. He translated these skills to
politics and quickly made his reputation on them.
The story has been told many times. How in 1962, after a stint as a Navy
fighter pilot, Rumsfeld was elected to Congress at age 30 from suburban Chicago
and almost immediately helped organize a coup to oust the veteran House
Republican leader, replacing him with genial Gerald R. Ford of Michigan.
How Richard M. Nixon noticed the tough young man and recruited him to run an
anti-poverty program. How from that unlikely post, Rumsfeld picked a fight with
Nixon's foreign policy guru, Henry A. Kissinger, arguing that Kissinger was too
slow to pull out of Vietnam. How Ford found himself president after Nixon's
disgrace and called Rumsfeld before he called anyone else. How Rumsfeld, as
Ford's chief of staff, pulled off a "Halloween massacre" that finally reduced
Kissinger's power over foreign policy, while installing Rumsfeld as the
nation's youngest-ever secretary of defense (and moved Cheney up a step, too,
making him the youngest White House chief of staff).
How Rumsfeld also orchestrated the dumping of Kissinger's original patron,
Nelson A. Rockefeller, as Ford's 1976 running mate.
Fred Ikle, a pillar of the conservative defense establishment, paused a
moment when asked to sum up Rumsfeld's style. "Let me put it this way," he said
at last, "I would not like to be on the opposite side of an interagency clash
from him."
Rumsfeld clashed with Powell almost immediately after Bush was inaugurated
in 2001. The issue was China. Powell was quoted characterizing the United
States and China as friends, even as Rumsfeld was framing his first major
strategic document, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, around the idea of
China as a rising threat. Asked about the dispute at the time, Rumsfeld made a
joke at Powell's expense. They agreed on "everything," Rumsfeld said, "except
those few cases where Colin is still learning."
The laughter stopped as the Iraq invasion approached. According to
Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, a "cabal" of
Rumsfeld and Cheney "flummoxed the process" of planning the war. They carried
their ideas in "secret" directly to Bush for decisions; meanwhile Rumsfeld
authorized his staff to "tell the State Department to go screw itself in a
closet somewhere."
Anything Powell favored, the Defense Department opposed. Powell suggested
more allies; Rumsfeld announced he was ready to go it alone. Powell favored a
larger force; Rumsfeld weeded out troops unit by unit. Ultimately, the invasion
was a repudiation of the Powell Doctrine in U.S. military affairs. The force
deployed was light and lethal -- but not, history has clearly shown, the master
of all contingencies. Nor was there a clear exit strategy, merely the hope of
garlands and easy reconstruction -- a point war critics have often made and
Rumsfeld has never rebutted in detail.
As for Rumsfeld's war on the military culture, Bush fired the first shot in
January 2001. Standing alongside his new defense secretary, Bush promised that
Rumsfeld would "challenge the status quo inside the Pentagon." This formulation
appealed to Rumsfeld, who had spent the quarter-century since his first
Pentagon tour in private business, making a fortune by shaking up
under-performing companies.
Diving in, he found his marching orders in a speech given by candidate Bush
at the Citadel in 1999, calling for a "transformation" of the great but
lumbering U.S. military. The Cold War force was built around big foreign bases
and heavy weapons "platforms," such as tank columns and aircraft carriers. With
the Cold War over, Bush said, America should use the chance to "skip a
generation" of weaponry and tactics to seize the future of warfare ahead of
everyone else. A transformed military would be lightly armored, rapidly
deployable, invisible to radar, guided by satellites. It would fight with
Special Operations troops and futuristic "systems" of weaponry, robots
alongside soldiers, all linked by computers. This force would be unmatchable in
combat, Bush predicted, but it should not be used for the sort of
"nation-building" that characterized Pentagon deployments to Haiti and the
Balkans under Clinton.
Little of this was entirely new. Since Vietnam, Pentagon leaders --
including the younger Rumsfeld -- had been searching for more efficient, less
entangling, ways to project U.S. power. Even the Army, perhaps the most
hidebound of the services, had begun a complete reorganization to make itself
easier to deploy. "Some things had been done since the end of the Cold War,"
Rumsfeld conceded in the interview.
But the Pentagon is the world's biggest, richest bureaucracy, with an annual
budget larger than the entire economies of all but about a dozen nations --
bigger than Switzerland or Sweden. The leviathan managed to shrug off most deep
and lasting changes. Thus, when Rumsfeld took office in 2001, he recalled, "we
were located pretty much where we had been located, geographically, around the
world. We still had the same processes and systems and approaches."
Some of the most important changes on Rumsfeld's menu were also the
toughest, because of the entrenched interests involved. Weapons programs and
bases provide jobs in nearly every congressional district. Republican or
Democrat doesn't matter when it comes time to protect those jobs, so the
programs and the bases endure even after the strategy behind them has expired.
Some defense secretaries quail before this status quo, but not Rumsfeld.
Shortly after taking office, he began questioning continued funding for the
Crusader supercannon, an artillery piece designed to destroy Soviet tank
columns that no longer existed, and the Comanche helicopter, another Cold War
relic. Such efforts made him a hero in the military think tanks but earned him
a lot of enemies on the Hill. By late summer 2001, Washington was buzzing with
rumors that Rumsfeld would soon resign.
Then came September 11.
Rumsfeld dazzled the public and his troops with his cool courage on that
fateful morning. When American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, he
rushed to the sound and shudder of the blast and began rescuing victims. Cheney
later told a friend that this moment completely remade Rumsfeld in the eyes of
the military, and Rumsfeld seized this second chance.
"The war comes along," Rumsfeld recalled, "and a lot of people said you
can't do both -- there's no way you can continue to transform that department
and . . . deal with the war simultaneously . . . [But] the war gives an impetus
to it, a sense of urgency. One of the things that big institutions need is a
sense of urgency. They are so lethargic . . . Well, the war created such a
sense of urgency that those things are getting fixed. And they're getting fixed
. . . a whale of a lot faster than might otherwise be the case because there's
a penalty for not fixing them fast."
Buoyed by early successes of Special Ops forces and satellite-guided bombs
in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld turned the run-up to Iraq into a transformation
workshop. The Pentagon already had a plan for the possible toppling of Saddam
Hussein; it was now taken from the shelf and completely remade under Rumsfeld's
steady pressure. Generals and civilians involved in the process endured
Rumsfeld's favorite management technique -- a brand of relentless interrogation
known as "wirebrushing." Many grew frustrated at the fact that Rumsfeld always
had a million questions -- but rarely said openly what he wanted or
believed.
Editing and badgering, Rumsfeld cut the troop strength in the invasion plan
by more than half, and cut the deployment time by months. Instead of a bombing
phase led by the Air Force and Navy, followed by a ground war phase of soldiers
and Marines, the secretary pushed for a truly joint operation, all branches of
the military working together on a blitz to Baghdad. The dream of America's
defense secretaries for a half-century -- genuine cooperation among the
military services -- came to life.
Combining the audacity of Grant at Vicksburg with a degree of speed and
precision never before seen on Earth, the invasion of Iraq "was the utter
vindication of Rumsfeld's transformation," an impressed European diplomat said
not long ago. "And," he added, "also its downfall." For there was a crack in
this machinery that would be exposed if Iraq was not wrapped up quickly.
Rumsfeld spoke of this internal flaw, briefly and elliptically, during the
interview in his office. He was describing the Pentagon as an Industrial Age
contraption of rattling "conveyor belts" onto which huge weapons purchases and
fat plans are loaded months and even years before they will come to fruition.
The belts clatter along, beyond human reach, until finally they dump their
loads, whether or not America needs them anymore.
"To have affected it, you had to have affected it five or six years ago --
or at least two or three years ago," Rumsfeld said of the system. So his
mission, as he described it, was to get his hands into the machinery and start
hauling resources off some belts so he could load new projects onto others.
"I've had to reach in and grab all those conveyor belts and try to make them
rationalize, one against another." This process of moving resources from belt
to belt he calls "balancing risks." As in, the risk of not having a
supercannon, compared with the risk of not spending enough money on
satellites.
This is where the problem of Iraq came in. Rumsfeld explained that he has
had to "balance risks between a war plan -- an investment in something
immediately -- and an investment in something in the future." This opened a
small window into a very important section of his thinking. Bush recently
compared the war in Iraq to World War II, which implies a total commitment.
Without a doubt, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, the war effort was the only
military conveyor belt worth mentioning. By contrast, Rumsfeld has conceived of
Iraq on a smaller scale, as just one of many hungry conveyor belts inside his
Pentagon.
He understood that as soon as the Iraq belt started rolling, it would carry
resources away from his preferred investments in the future. So he speaks of
his job as a matter of reaching onto that belt and pulling stuff off. "Balance"
in this context is another word for "limit" -- limit the amount of money,
troops, staff and materiel bound for Iraq. The war he wanted was a short one,
involving a relatively small force that would start heading home as soon as
Saddam was chased from his palaces. When Army generals urged him instead to
load the Iraq conveyor belt with enough troops to fully occupy the country --
securing captured weapons depots, patrolling borders, ensuring order --
Rumsfeld saw the large fixed cost involved in recruiting and training thousands
of new troops, a cost that would rattle down Pentagon belts for years to come.
He tried to balance those risks of chaos against the conveyor belts that could
otherwise be loaded with resources destined for future transformation.
It was a gamble, and one he has stuck with through round after round of
raised stakes. Of course, the irony is that the Iraq effort has been the
opposite of cheap and short. Despite Rumsfeld's best efforts, it is a
budget-buster, and one can almost hear the conveyor belts destined for his
transformed tomorrow grinding to a halt, one by one.
It is easier to get into something than to get out of it . . .
Another of Rumsfeld's Rules is the reminder that staff members, no matter
how senior, are not the president of the United States. This, too, is central
to an understanding of Rumsfeld's relationship to the war in Iraq. He didn't
tell the president what to do because that wasn't his job. Some decisions, such
as the decision to go to war based on a certain set of assumptions and a
particular set of plans, belong to the president alone. "George Bush deserves
the credit or blame for the war," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at
the Brookings Institution. "Rumsfeld gets the credit or blame for the
execution."
The next few months could shed a lot of light on the ratio of credit and
blame. Progress toward victory would make the earlier mistakes seem smaller.
Gen. Casey told Congress in September that the United States has entered a
critical period for its counterinsurgency strategy. The tenuous political
structure of Iraq will either begin to solidify around the new constitution and
next month's parliamentary elections, or it will fall apart. Civil war could
doom the attempt to raise and train an Iraqi army that represents all factions
of the country. But if, step by step, ordinary Iraqis decide to reject the
insurgency and drive out foreign jihadists, then violence should ebb. American
public support for the war might rebound. Iraqi troops could take the place of
Americans, and U.S. ground troops could start to come home.
That's the hope.
"But if this becomes the next Lebanon," O'Hanlon adds, with the United
States withdrawing in haste, and a shattered country left behind, then
Rumsfeld's "reputation will go down among the worst secretaries ever."
And what about Rumsfeld's other wars? The first was a rout. Colin Powell has
returned to private life, having been dropped, flipped and pinned in short
order by the king of the bureaucratic wrestlers. It wasn't really a fair fight
-- there was a tinge of World Wrestling Federation tag-teaming when Cheney
joined Rumsfeld in pummeling Powell. But the former secretary of state is too
much a loyal soldier to talk about it even now, Wilkerson, his former aide,
explained.
The verdict on Pentagon transformation may come in February, when Rumsfeld
will become the first secretary of defense to publish two Quadrennial Defense
Reviews. Congress has mandated these head-to-toe examinations of U.S. defense
needs every four years since the early 1990s. Rumsfeld's first QDR was
virtually finished on September 11, 2001, and so it barely reflected, in a
hastily drafted introduction, the new war on terror.
The new document will show how the hard reality of Iraq has altered
Rumsfeld's original futuristic, China-focused vision. Acting Deputy Secretary
of Defense Gordon England is in charge of preparing the QDR, and in a recent
interview he sketched a picture different from Rumsfeld's original signature
ideas. Robots, computers, missile shields and orbiting lasers address threats
that no longer seem as pressing. The someday menace of enemy missiles has faded
compared with today's car bombs, suicide vests and that medieval remnant,
beheadings.
This time around, England said, attention will be given to various
back-office reorganizations that will surely glaze the eyes of those who once
thrilled to Rumstud. "The business practices, and acquisition process, and the
personnel systems for human capital management," England listed. "That's of
great interest to Secretary Rumsfeld and to me." Even among Demo-cratic defense
experts, Rumsfeld gets a lot of credit for tackling these dull-but-important
issues. Still, speeding up the hiring of Arabic speakers, or streamlining the
process for acquiring the next-generation of bomb detectors -- while of great
value -- is a far cry from changing the very nature of war.
In that sense, perhaps the greatest transformation at the Pentagon during
Rumsfeld's tenure will turn out to be the transformation of Donald
Rumsfeld.
Even so, Iraq still won't loom largest on Rumsfeld's horizon. As England,
his deputy, put it: Iraq "is just a small part of a long war in many
places."
So finish there, with the "long war in many places"? How is that going?
Gen. Abizaid, the senior officer in the Central Command -- which covers
Iraq, Afghanistan and many other hot spots -- appeared before the Senate Armed
Services Committee not long ago. He said he saw progress in Iraq, but mostly
wanted to talk about the "al Qaeda threat as the main threat that we face."
"Its global reach and its ability to inflict damage should not be
underestimated," Abizaid said. "This enemy seeks to acquire weapons of mass
destruction and will certainly use such weapons if they obtain them . . . They
experimented with anthrax in Afghanistan. They tried to develop crude chemical
weapons in Afghanistan. They are always talking about how they might develop a
radiological dispersal device. If they could buy or acquire a nuclear weapon,
they would. This is not my guess, this is what they say. It's well known they
want to do this, and they'll stop at nothing."
Abizaid continued through a catalogue of fears both urgent and numbingly
familiar. Neither journalists nor senators seemed to be paying rapt attention,
and so there was little comment when the general reached his conclusion. Which
was:
A full four years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the
bombing of the Pentagon, America's national security apparatus is still not
properly arranged for the fight against terrorism. "We are not yet organized to
the extent that we need to be to fight this enemy," Abizaid said. "We have time
to do that, but we need to seize the moment."
Rumsfeld, seated with Abizaid at the witness table, might find in those
words a mission worthy of his energy and passion. Iraq may have cost him his
chance to remake the wars of the future. But there is still the unfinished job
of getting ready for the war we're in right now.
David Von Drehle is a staff writer on the Magazine. He will be fielding
questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
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