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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 2 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, by Andrew Cockburn. Scribner, 2007. 247 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Jeffrey Record
Professor of strategy, Air War College (his views are entirely his own)
On a visit to Iraq in December 2004, the secretary of defense was confronted by a national guardsman who wanted to know why the Pentagon had not provided sufficient body and vehicular armor against the insurgent enemy’s lethal so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that were shredding American road patrols and convoys. The secretary replied with typically dismissive arrogance: “As you know,” he said, “you go to war with the army that you have, …not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
The same can be said for secretaries of defense. In March 2003, the United States went to war in Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld, a chief architect of the most calamitous misapplication of U.S. military power since the debacle of Vietnam and now the most despised secretary of defense since Robert S. McNamara. Indeed, by the fall of 2006, Rumsfeld had become the favorite whipping boy for neoconservative pundits and congressional war hawks, who remained convinced that the decision to invade an ancient Arab heartland to overthrow an already castrated Baathist regime in Baghdad was a good idea. But for the incompetence of Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and L. Paul Bremer, so the argument still goes, the American gamble in Iraq could have established a stable democratic U.S. client state worthy of the neoconservatives’ pre-war strategic hallucinations.
President George W. Bush reluctantly fired Rumsfeld in November 2006 because the secretary had become an intolerable political liability — a lightning rod for a situation in Iraq that even Bush conceded was unacceptable. The man that Richard Nixon regarded in the early 1970s as “a ruthless little bastard” had become not only a symbol of a botched war but also the primary target in an escalating civil-military struggle to assign blame for the American mess in Iraq. And it is this struggle that provides the context for assessing Andrew Cockburn’s Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. The book’s very subtitle and jacket cover (featuring a scowling Rumsfeld) deny any possibility of favorable treatment, and with good reason: the unpleasant former presidential aspirant proved to be as ignorant and incompetent in Iraq as McNamara, a technocrat with no political ambitions, was in Vietnam. Both men were also arrogant, abrasive, dictatorial and supremely contemptuous of professional military advice. In the case of Rumsfeld, this extended to provoking in March-April 2006 an eruption of public denunciations of him and his war policies by no fewer than six retired Army and Marine Corps generals who were obviously speaking for many of their fellow officers still on active duty.
Cockburn traces Rumsfeld’s professional career from his arrival in Washington in 1962 as a 30-year-old congressman from an affluent Chicago district to his fall from Cabinet office 44 years later. It was an in-and-out-of-government career of pitiless bureaucratic cunning driven by unprincipled presidential ambitions that in the end left him with few allies. It was Rumsfeld, as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, who engineered the 1976 “Halloween massacre” in which the White House fired CIA Director William Colby and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 ticket, and stripped Henry Kissinger of his post as national security adviser. Not only did Rumsfeld have himself nominated to replace Schlesinger; he also engineered the banishment of presidential wannabe George H.W. Bush to the political wilderness of CIA director as well as the elevation of Rumsfeld’s (then) flunky, Dick Cheney, to White House chief of staff. In so doing Rumsfeld incurred the everlasting hatred of the elder Bush and the occasional loyalty of Cheney, who, as the Reagan years drew to a close, supported Bush’s, not Rumsfeld’s, bid for the White House (the Rumsfeld-Cheney relationship was one of considerable tension). It took the election to the White House of the son of the father who hated Rumsfeld to pave the way for Rumsfeld’s return as secretary of defense. One wonders whether his selection was a calculated act of defiance on the part of Bush 43 in his difficult relationship with Bush 41.
History will not be kind to Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. The bill of indictment includes his multiple failures in Iraq, most notoriously an insistence on an invasion force too small to seize control of the country, his gratuitous intimidation and humiliation of military professionals, his bureaucratic megalomania, and his skill at side-stepping responsibility for bad decisions. Above all was his addiction to perfecting U.S. conventional military supremacy at the expense of preparing for the politically messy, low-tech irregular wars that have dominated the post-Soviet world and occasioned the only failed American military interventions: Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and now, most probably, Iraq. In Rumsfeld’s defense, however, it must be acknowledged that no single individual can be held responsible for a policy disaster of Iraq’s magnitude. Iraq was a group effort. President George W. Bush is, after all, the administration’s senior “decider,” and Dick Cheney, the most influential vice president in history, has established a record of judgment on Iraq even worse than Rumsfeld’s.
Nor does the military get a free pass. With few exceptions, those in charge went along with a Rumsfeld-dictated war plan they knew to be dangerously flawed and then went on to bungle a counterinsurgent war for which they were completely unprepared. Cockburn pulls no punches:
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The generals, who had accepted [Rumsfeld’s] vision of the invasion without demur, ensured the failure of the occupation through lapses both moral, tolerating the routine abuse of prisoners, and tactical, such as running pointless “presence” patrols that chiefly served as effective IED magnets. Faced with the consequences of their actions, however, the military could always point to the defense secretary’s original withholding of troops as an excuse for everything that had subsequently gone wrong.
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Even the one senior officer who did resign (albeit quietly) in opposition to the war, Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later confessed, “I should have had the gumption to confront [Rumsfeld]. The right thing to do was to confront, and I didn’t. It’s something I’ll have to live with for a long time.” Newbold in fact believes that “if the military had said, ‘we won’t be part of this,’ then it wouldn’t have been.” (One hopes the example of Iraq will encourage the military leadership to summon the gumption to oppose those pushing for war with Iran. Rumsfeld may be gone, but his chief political legacy, Dick Cheney, remains the second-most powerful man in Washington.)
Cockburn’s Rumsfeld does not pretend to be objective, but it is an important artifact in the raging historiography of a foreign-policy wreck still in progress. It gives no quarter, but neither did its subject. Rumsfeld brought this book on himself.
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