From WaPo:
Wrestling With History: Sometimes You Have to Fight the War You have, Not the War You Wish You Had
Michael Brown (not-so-fondly known as Brownie) had turned in his resignation and was so perturbed at Katrina wrecking his plans, he let New Orleans drown and let the citizens of three states flounder in misery without proper care.
Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, had a memo laden with bullet points that stressed everything that could go wrong with the Iraq War (some of which came to pass) and distributed it to the highest levels - walking the president through it personally - and became perturbed when the war didn't turn out to be the high-tech showcase that he wanted it to be, so he only watched over it with half an eye. But at least the memo showed he was prepared...
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."
More below the fold:
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.
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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.
It seems Rumsfeld has a death grip on this memo - a shield against the critics and the investigative committees - an "I told you so" to protect him from taking a portion of the blame. A thin defense given the Defense Science Board's findings:
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.
William Kristol has charged Rumsfeld with not having his heart in it. Odd, since Rumsfeld signed Kristol's 1998 letter calling for the ouster of Saddam...or not so odd when this is noted:
"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."
And so we begin the Brownie Rumsfeld era. The man in charge of the war just doesn't want to be there, much less give it his all. In the pre-invasion planning, the State Department sent a team of Iraq experts to the Pentagon to help plan the reconstruction - Rummy sent them away. This was the base for Col. Wilkerson's complaint in a recent interview, "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."
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.
Rumsfeld's plans were for a high-tech military force of the future, and so when allocating troops and supplies for Iraq, he opted for saving money for that future military force instead.
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.
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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."
Impervious. Such a good word. And rather like Brownie fretting whether his outfit looked good on TV, Rumsfeld has his attention on something other than the tragedy unfolding before him:
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.
You're not supposed to "reflect" on your eventful tenure until it's over, right? Huh. Silly me.
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.
And so the generals went to history for their guidance:
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.
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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.
And from ticking off those overseas, he has turned to ticking off Congress...Republicans, no less:
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.
Who knew we had Rummy to thank for pissing off the senators so badly that they'd support McCain's amendment? And here I thought it was because they were against torture. Silly me again.
Brownie may have thumbed his nose at the American people, but Rumsfeld aimed higher - a pissing match with Colin Powell:
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.
Rumsfeld had many plans for the transformation of the military, aided by candidate Bush in 1999:
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.
Rummy took office in 2001 and the fight with Congress began. Republican and Democrat alike were getting ticked because of the threat to the weapons programs and bases that provided jobs in nearly every congressional district. Rumsfeld didn't care:
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.
Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, his success and dazzling image down the road came to depend on Iraq being a quick strike - go in, depose Saddam, shake hands with the new leaders, and get the hell back out. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men....
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.
He compared running the Pentagon to conveyor belts in machinery:
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.
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"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 . . .
And so, as soldiers die for lack of training, protection, equipment, and planning, Rumsfeld sits in his tower at the Pentagon shining his medals and dreaming of robots, computers, missile shields and orbiting lasers. Where Michael Brown simply quit in his war against Mother Nature, Donald Rumsfeld half-heartedly directs the war against Iraq...because it wasn't the kind of war he wanted.
You're doing a heckuva a job, Rummy.