My Thoughts on Rummy
ID: 4830
Date: 2006-11-22 23:58:57
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I hang around in lofty neo-con circles. I attend cocktail parties with conservative swells. I discuss politics into the wee hours of the morning with fellow Republicans in Omaha's fashionable salons. So rightly or wrongly, I think I have the pulse on American conservative thought.
In my travels through America’s ranking conservative circles the last few months, it is no exaggeration to say that the only praise I ever heard regarding Donald Rumsfeld came from my own mouth. As unpopular as Rumsfeld had become in liberal circles, he was even less well liked in conservative circles where his brusqueness and arrogance were not just the stuff of legend but were experienced first hand. Frequently.
So I was stunned when President Bush told the nation a week before the election that Donald Rumsfeld would be remaining through the end of his term. First, this hadn’t squared with what I had heard from insiders who tend to be reliable in regards to such scuttlebutt. Second, this seemed like a maladroit play since the only conservative I knew who really wanted Rumsfeld to stay was me. While I was flattered that the White House would go to such lengths to ensure my enthusiastic support (perhaps they saw how I had personally sunk the Ricketts and Haney campaigns with a few withering phrases), the gesture really wasn’t necessary.
Thus it was a bizarre coda to the election season when the President “resigned” Rummy. If he was going to deep-six the SecDef, it would have made a lot more sense to do it a few months earlier and signal a “new direction” in Iraq (however bogus or fanciful) to a country that genuinely pined for one. Moreover, if he was going to fire Rummy the day after the voting was done, why did the President alienate undecided voters by falsely declaring his intention just days earlier to go to the mattresses on behalf of his beleaguered Pentagon chief?
It makes no sense. There’s not enough lipstick in the world to preetify this pig of a political move. The White House’s political operations seem to be perpetually stuck in Katrina-mode, and that’s not good news for any of us.
AS FAR AS THE SUBSTANCE OF RUMMY being fired, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, Rumsfeld was a visionary who knew the Pentagon had to be transformed. When he arrived in DC in 2001, the Generals at the Pentagon were preparing for a World War Three with China that was scheduled to arrive in 2040. Believe it or not, there’s still a sizable subset of the military (the USAF, for one) structure that thinks that’s the ball we should be keeping our eye on. Rumsfeld was preaching about the dangers posed by asymmetrical warfare since the 90’s and came to DC with the specific purpose of readying the military to deal with that threat.
Rummy was also hard-headed. He knew that the Powell Doctrine for war (few casualties, overwhelming force, quick exit strategy) had limited applicability. What Powell Doctrine adherents miss is that you fight the wars you have to, not the ones you want to, and the current war with Islamic Fascism most certainly falls into the prior category. The Islamists won’t agree to peace because their intentions don’t square with our paradigm of how we want to fight.
Rumsfeld knew there would be disappointments and lost battles during a struggle of this magnitude. Five days after 9/11, he went on the Sunday talk shows and dryly referred to 9/11 as a battle in a new kind of war, a battle that we had lost. He was hard-headed enough to worry less about politics both inside and outside the Pentagon than any recent Secretary of Defense. He was willing to make the unpopular calls and to suffer public criticism when necessary.
But the time had come for Rummy to go. It had become increasingly obvious that he and the administration weren’t in sync and that the administration’s war effort had become incoherent. An example: Many people wonder why we haven’t sealed off the borders between Iran, Syria and Iraq. Some people cite this as evidence that we need more troops on the ground. In truth, those borders could be sealed off quite effectively by air. The decision to not do so has been a political one, not one borne out of military inability.
My point is that Rumsfeld’s war could not succeed without his colleagues on the political side showing a ferocity similar to his own. And if there was going to be no such display, then Rummy had to adapt his plans accordingly.
Additionally, the old adage that “you can’t fire the players so you fire the coach” comes to mind. Relations between Rumsfeld and the military had become hopelessly personally poisonous. If the Pentagon is to be transformed, Rumsfeld has lost his chance to be an effective agent for bringing about the necessary changes.
SO WHAT KIND OF SECRETARY OF DEFENSE will Bob Gates be? I don’t know for sure and more ominously, I bet the White House doesn’t either. Personally, I find more to fear in his appointment than I do in Alcee Hastings’, but we’ll give him a chance. If the country is about to re-embrace Scowcroftian realism, we’re about to realize a hard lesson about that policy’s limitation. And if the Rummy-fied Joint Military Command mentality is going to return to worrying about the enemies it chooses instead of the enemies that choose us, we’ll have bigger troubles still. Lets hope all the yes-men Generals and Admirals follow Rummy and make a hasty retreat...errr, retirement soon.
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