Redstate

By AcademicElephant Posted in War — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Another disappointed supporter of Mr. Rumsfeld writes in:

Speaking as a person with a nephew in the 2/3 infantry, I first want to say that I understand perfectly the president's position in asking for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation at this late stage, although the timing was bizarre. It would be awfully hard for Rummy to manage the Pentagon from this point forward while spending most of his time in a witness chair through bogus investigative hearings perpetrated by the new congressional leadership. IT will be bad enough as it is. The worst part of it all is the maladroit signal it sends to the troops generally--they are asking, does this mean we won't be allowed to finish the job, that the president is going to abandon the Iraqi people for whom we've been working to solidify a permanent open polity in favor of a "negotiated solution" that won't work and leaves the country open to the whims of Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia?

Rightly or wrongly, Secretary Rumsfeld became a lightning rod for every possible spin on his actual ideas, to the detriment of the national conversation that still needs to be held on the war against Islamist extremism. It is for this reason that Secretary Rumsfeld needs to get started writing that multi-volume work: the White House, the entire Cabinet, and especially the United States Congress (both houses, both sides of the aisle) utterly abdicated their responsibility and left Don Rumsfeld to become the face --the ONLY face--of the War on Terror. He is the one who put his department to work on legal and moral discussions, the generation of ideas, concepts and precepts, and forward vision that should have been a NATIONAL CONCERN. The only other persons to attempt anything like that breadth, scope and depth of thought and tried to make their cases in public were Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. The American people need a jumping off point that a book from Rumsfeld could provide in order to reflect on the following:

1. Congress liked to hang all the blame and none of the credit for thought on legal issues around the neck of Don Rumsfeld, but what did Congress do other than whine? The Patriot act was the beginning and the end of the taking up of issues in Congress. There needed to be an internal accounting, aired publicly, of Congressional irresponsibility- -from its willful complicity in the decimation of the military in the 1990s to the failure to resurrect a working CIA since the Church committee hearings in the 1970s. When the hell will Congress take responsibility for its own massive failures?

2. It was fine for Colin Powell and Richard Armitage to blab to Bob Woodward over the years about how they were keeping that horrible Don Rumsfeld at bay, but when history looks back at a greater distance I hope people wonder what the heck Powell was doing with his time at the State Department. Will people notice that the only person traveling internationally in the aftermath of September 11 was Don Rumsfeld? That it was Rumsfeld who negotiated everything with every head of state in the entire Middle East and beyond? That it was Don Rumsfeld who traveled the country, made the speeches, trying to press NATO to become a working organization and Europe to fund its fair portion thereof, trying to jump-start the national conversation about what a war on terror was and should mean to people here and everywhere? When did Colin Powell leave the office? Who traveled to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Australia, Indonesia . . . .It sure as hell wasn't Colin Powell. It was only his job, you know, as Secretary of State. Only Don Rumsfeld is in a position to lambast Colin Powell in the distance of time, in the book he needs to write, for abdicating his own and his agency's responsibility to participate in engagement of the entire discussion of what a war on terror should look like and be like--and of reforming the mess that has become the State Department.

3. Don Rumsfeld engaged the public he served directly HIMSELF. For this, he deserves a medal for trying to hold a national conversation about the physical, emotional, cognitive and philosophical underpinnings of thought in a way that NOT ONE OTHER INDIVIDUAL IN A POSITION OF RESPONSIBILITY DID in this entire nation. He did this, often under intense scrutiny and ridicule, IN PUBLIC, EVERY DAY, jousting with the press. He went to the podium HIMSELF. He went to Iraq and Afghanistan and took the darts in the chest HIMSELF. The congress hid in offices and pointed fingers, the president came out with the occasional speech, and Dr. Rice tried in vain to win more
attention than she did, but ultimately it was Don Rumsfeld who had the GUTS to go out in public and take it, whatever came. Now we will be back to mealy-mouthed non-statement statements from droning spokesmen who will be the only public face of our government. Again. I hope the press appreciates that, I really do.

4. The wrong lessons were learned from Vietnam and are about to be practiced again! It wasn't the failure of the Vietnamization strategy toward the end of the war that went wrong, it was the failure to turn to it sooner that caused the erosion of support that ultimately caused the Congress to kill funding for the South Vietnamese after we left. Don Rumsfeld wanted an Iraqification strategy very early on in Iraq that was turned down by the White House and killed off by opposed generals as well as the State Department. He wanted an expatriate Iraqi army trained and embedded with the U.S. Army to become the face of the invasion and to assume the responsibility for outreach into Iraqi communities. Had that strategy been adopted, there would have been a much greater chance of finding Iraqis who could safely and quickly reconstitute internal Iraqi army and police forces, and of finding Iraqi spokespeople who could gain political traction quickly and create a new Iraqi polity and civil society in short order. Since those ideas were squashed, we wound up with the hybrid authority in Paul Bremer inserted as head of a Coalition Provisional Authority that put an AMERICAN FACE on
Iraqi television day to day as the responsible authority. This
virtually guaranteed that we would get stuck looking like an invasion force that had to stay and assume responsibility for RUNNING THINGS, FIXING THINGS, CREATING THINGS--and yet was never going to be able to do so fast enough or sure-footedly enough. That's why we're still there. The State Department bailed out of the management portion of the process, and so did the absolutely useless United Nations. In the absence of their participation, OF COURSE the Defense Department would have to be slow to adjust--this civil affairs process was never what the old-guard generals ever wanted to have a conversation about, much less DO--but somebody had to do it once the kibosh was put on Rumsfeld's very good idea, undermining ret. Gen. Jay Garner. I'll be the president would like to have that moment back.

5. As a component of having an Iraqi-trained invasion force,
Rumsfeld wanted early on to have that force available (speaking the language and dialects, knowing the territory) to be able to pursue militant guerrillas back into the neighboring states from which they poured and continue to pour--Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This was squashed again in Situation Room discussions, but essentially what is being argued that we need to do now is what Rumsfeld argued that we should do then--only it would have been Iraqis doing it, and faster, and more assuredly since Iraqis could easily identify non-Iraqi militants and develop intelligence information more readily on which to act. Duh. This is the area in which Rumsfeld most needs to educate people about what he really argued for, because in so doing he is the only person who might help stave off the tendency of the people via the press to LEARN THE WRONG LESSONS FROM IRAQ. Just as we learned the wrong lessons from Vietnam.

6. At least Don Rumsfeld was successful, whether anyone properly characterized his efforts or not, in executing some bold and significant strategies to try to make the lumbering Department of Defense more workable. That is certainly more than any other agency anywhere can say. Did congress attempt to restructure the committee process so that foreign affairs and defense and intelligence heads don't have to spend the bulk of their time in committee? No. Did Colin Powell try to make the State Department relevant to anything that's bound to go on from this point forward? No, it's a department still incentivized to reward people the most for sitting around in tea parties in Brussels than for taking on hard tasks in trouble spots around the world. Did anybody try to blow the CIA up and start it over so that it might actually do something? Only Porter Goss, and that happened so late that the window had already closed. Some people might think he was too arrogant, too blunt, too insular, too whatever . . . but Don Rumsfeld DID change his agency when it most needed change. Nobody else did a thing. Not a damn thing. Will somebody please explain once more what it is that the Department of
Homeland Security is supposed to do besides take away my cigarette lighter every time I fly?

These things, and more, are the elements of the GIGANTIC series I wish Don Rumsfeld would write--not just because I think it might resurrect his undeservedly tarnished reputation, but because nobody else is really interested in airing the ideas and having the national (actually, international) conversation that he has been trying to have since September 12, 2001. It is IMPORTANT that somebody do it. It is important because looking back, it was willingness to have that conversation and engage multiple cabinet agencies and members of congress (instead of one cabinet agency and no congressmen today) that set the machinery in motion in Truman's time that ultimately won the Cold War. The alternative is that the entire War on Terror now will be dismissed as two discrete small wars--Afghanistan and Iraq--which will be viewed as partially unsuccessful. This will cause us to disengage and try to run and hide from what surely is coming at us--at the cost of once again being thought, as Osama bin Laden said, a people who will cut and run rather than stand and fight. As the suburbs are burning in France, we need to reflect that the alternative will be another BIG BAD MOMENT from which point we go berserk and have a worldwide open conflict with horrible consequences. Either that, or nativist/racist parties in the European democracies will finally take over once enough damage is done by Islamist extremists. If worse comes, there will be no going back--and we will wish we had had the national conversation with Don Rumsfeld. We will wish we had kept the pedal to the metal now, while the conflicts were still loose and not coalesced, and that we had stood and fought hard as he argued. Otherwise, we will be sorry, I fear. Sorry, indeed.

And THAT is why Donald Rumsfeld needs to get started on that multi-volume work. Nobody else, I fear, is willing to try.