There are two very good reasons why Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will serve out the second Bush term. First, if Rumsfeld quit now it would be under a cloud - well a downpour actually - of failure and incompetence in his mishandling of the invasion of Iraq and its disastrous aftermath. Rumsfeld no doubt clings to the illusion that he will somehow be able to restore his shredded reputation in the next 2 ½ years. Fat chance.
Second, the last thing the Bungler-in-Chief himself wants is the departure of his hapless Defense Secretary, both because he fulfills an invaluable role as lightning rod for the strategic blunders associated with the Iraq War - which might otherwise fall, in full force, upon his own head - and because his resignation would signal an admission of mistakes and failures by Bush himself. God forbid!
There is no question that Rumsfeld deserves the excoriation in print he has received at the hands of a half-dozen retired army and marine generals. Nevertheless, the military brass cannot and must not escape responsibility for their own culpability for the mess in which they placed our forces in Iraq.
It was the military leadership, after all, who prepared and signed off on the plan to attack Iraq with barely 150,000 troops which was sufficient to overwhelm a weakling Iraqi Army but woefully inadequate to the job of occupying the nation. General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the invasion plan, appears to have mistaken himself for George Patton and the Iraqi Army for the Wehrmacht; he was sorely mistaken on both counts. There was no major land battle; the Iraqis including the Republican Guard essentially just melted away. The hard part (as anybody with even half a brain knew it would), came afterwards. General Franks, however, did not plan at all for the occupation - that’s the part that has actually cost nearly all of the American military deaths and injuries (not to mention Iraqis - mostly civilian). He couldn’t be bothered; wasn’t his job he thought. Left it entirely to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon which, in turn, insisted on taking the job from the more competent State Department and then did - well, nothing. It does not appear that Franks evinced any curiosity at all regarding plans for the aftermath of the actual invasion - a stunning act of voluntary ignorance that has cost our forces dear ever since and that will tarnish his reputation evermore.
Neither can Rumsfeld be blamed for the United States forces’ lamentable lack of training and preparation for irregular warfare. In contrast to the British forces who occupied Basra and its environs, the same American troops who conducted themselves superbly in more conventional forms of warfare, performed far less well when confronted with a burgeoning insurgency. In contrast to the Brits further south, they interacted uneasily, if at all, with the locals and tended to overreact in situations where they felt themselves threatened, with the result that lethal force was sometimes used inadvertentlyagainst innocent civilians. Much less respect for the cultural sensibilities of Iraqis was shown early on by most of the American units. Precious early goodwill engendered by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny was squandered by the heavy- handed tactics of the U.S. soldiers and marines and this fact, together with the failure to assert control over after-conflict chaos and to quickly move to fix essential infrastructure such as electricity and water supply, fed the development of a violent resistance that continues to this day.
How could we have failed to absorb hard-won lessons from Vietnam on waging irregular warfare? Did our military brass really believe that our enemies would fight to our strength and confront us head on in set-piece battle rather than find our weaknesses and exploit them? How could we allow our troops to be placed in a situation where they knew so little about the customs and traditions of the people of a country they were occupying, and so ill-equipped to deal with an insurgency that grew and spread like a cancer?
Our soldiers and marines have done everything we asked of them and more. Too bad their leaders, both civilian and military, proved so unworthy of them.
There is, also, a great irony to all of this. After the Afghanistan Campaign which was supported by all but a fraction of the American people and in which the U.S. very effectively employed a fraction of its conventional military might (using mostly unconventional units), there were few in the world who would have thought it possible to challenge American power. Now in Iraq, the U.S. military appears much less formidable and far more vulnerable. It has been fought to a draw by a collection of independent insurgent groups, some foreign but most Iraqi, with no heavy weapons, no airpower but with a lot of smarts, an uncanny ability to adapt and learn - and no shortage of guts.
This too will be part of George Bush’s legacy - and of those military leaders who failed to properly prepare our servicemen and women, or to stand up to a feckless and arrogant secretary of defense when it really counted.
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