Rumsfeld deathwatch begins in earnest
■"Scapegoat in Chief," op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 21 December 2004, p. A25.
I read USA Today today because you always get them free at hotels, and yes, I did notice that the top story was that a poll said a very slim majority of Americans said Rumsfeld should go (52% to 41% saying he was doing his job fine). But I didn't clip that one, because geez! You can't run your foreign policy or pick your team on that basis.
What the poll really said was that all those Republican senators are having an effect. And what all those senators are really signaling is that they're unhappy with the course of events in Iraq and want Bush to change policy. Since they can't say that much in such an up-front fashion (party unity and all), they instead attack the proxy, which logically is Rumsfeld.
Fine enough, but it's really the wrong target. As I said last night on C-SPAN, it wasn't the war that was bad, but the peace. We planned and executed the war brilliantly, and Rumsfeld's "transformed" force performed brilliantly.
Where the mistake was made was in the Interagency process, overseen by national security advisor Condi Rice, where Defense was allowed to take on too much of the postwar planning when in reality it should have been a multi-agency affair directed firmly by the National Security Council process.
In short, if the Republican senators want to direct their fire for maximum impact, it should be at both Rice in her capacity as nominee as Secretary of State (there, the Senate has real power to wield) and at Stephen Hadley, the Rice deputy who takes over at NSC. Rice needs to explain the lack of interagency balance in the postwar planning and execution, and Hadley needs to explain how he's going to run NSC differently than Rice and, if not differently, why not.
Going after Rumsfeld as Pentagon CEO in terms of the up-armoring issue is fine—going all the way back to the decision to invade Iraq. So the speed of the up-armoring process is a fair target. But the fact that the Army entered the year 2003 with only a tiny fraction of its Humvees and heavy trucks armored is completely the fault of the Army uniformed and civilian leadership going all the way back through the two Clinton administrations and into the first Bush one.
There is no doubt that plenty in the Army, especially the gray beards (meaning retired flags) hate Rumsfeld's transformation goals of making the Army more light, more MOOTWA (military-operations-other-than-war) and post-conflict stabilization focused, and more SysAdmin in nature. This is not the Army these old generals resurrected after Vietnam; this is the army they sough desperately to leave behind in Vietnam, and that's basically Ignatius' point in this op-ed. The Army v. Rumsfeld war is the higher-order version of the Fourth-Generation-Warfare v. Network-Centric Operations war, which is fundamentally a ground pounders' war with the fly boys, and that conflict is a huge step backwards, strategically speaking.
So, in my mind, the attacks on Rumsfeld are not only misdirected, they are a sign that the military, as it always does in defeat, is starting to turn on itself in both anger and fear.
Hmmmm, gotta remember that one the next time I lash out at my wife.