12-19-13 Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now

by Bradley Graham

PublicAffairs, 803 pp., $18.95 (paper)

A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a sixty-nine-year-old politician and businessman—a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful—returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar:

It is a touching and fateful scene, this trading of confidences between the recovering alcoholic president and the defense secretary whose son is struggling with drug addiction, and shows the intimacy that can be forged amid danger and turmoil and stress. Trust brings trust, confidence builds on confidence: the young inexperienced president, days before American bombs begin falling on Afghanistan, wants a “creative” plan to invade Iraq, developed “outside the normal channels”; the old veteran defense secretary, in a rare moment of weakness, craves human comfort and understanding.

And yet they’d hardly known one another, these two, before George W. Bush chose him for his secretary of defense nine months before. To George W., Donald Henry Rumsfeld had been little more than a political enemy of the Bush family. It was Rumsfeld, as President Gerald Ford’s ambitious young chief of staff, who had been instrumental in the so-called “Halloween Massacre” in 1975 that—so the legend goes—had helped clear the way for his own presidential ambitions by shunting George H.W. Bush, the wealthy eastern born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth preppie who was the scrappy Illinois-born wrestler’s main rival, off to be CIAdirector. This was a job for which Bush could gain Senate confirmation only by agreeing not to accept the vice-presidential nomination in 1976—even as Rumsfeld, as he tells us in his memoir, “for the third time in three years,…found myself being discussed for the vice presidential nomination.” As Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III cautioned George W. a quarter-century later, when Rumsfeld’s name was bruited for secretary of defense, “You know what he did to your daddy.”

Certainly he knew, and one can be forgiven for suspecting that this knowledge might have been a strong part of the attraction, perhaps for both men. When Errol Morris asks Rumsfeld whether his former aide Dick Cheney had brought him into the Bush administration, Rumsfeld replies, “I assume that’s the case. I don’t think George W. Bush’s father recommended it,” and then beams with self-congratulatory mischievousness. It is one of several digs at Bush the elder, at whose side he had treaded the perilous path of the highest ambition until, at a critical moment in August 1980, both men found themselves at the Republican National Convention pacing nervously in their Detroit hotel rooms, awaiting a call from Ronald Reagan about who would be his vice-president. In the end it was George H.W. Bush who was called to history.

Here as at several important moments in his brilliant and maddening film, Morris holds for three beats on that craggy inscrutable face, struggling to penetrate the benign “aw, shucks” good ol’ boy persona that Rumsfeld has worn so long he might well have forgotten how to put it aside. A decade ago Morris’s camera, focused for those extra beats on the face of Robert Strange McNamara in The Fog of War, had seemed to penetrate to some sort of appalling well of pain and pleading, deeply felt or conjured or both, lurking just behind McNamara’s rheumy eyes.

Confronted with Rumsfeld’s cheerful, hale-fellow-well-met opacity, Morris is mostly forced to plumb the shallows. At a question about his part in the so-called Halloween Massacre, he affects wry surprise. (“I suppose it is” called that, he concedes, with elaborately feigned wonder at the proclivity of reporters and historians to get things so wrong.) His alleged derailing of the elder Bush’s ambitions he dismisses as “utter nonsense.” (“I suppose it’s kind of more fun for somebody to be able to say they were pushed rather than they tripped.”) And his legendary ambition? “I never knew what I was going to do next,” he tells the filmmaker with chuckling insouciance. “The only thing I’ve ever volunteered for in my life: one, was to go into the Navy, and the other was to run for Congress.”

It is a familiar pose, the modest, even self-effacing man of talent to whom good things just…happen. Such unbidden blessings float down in many guises—for example, in the benevolent and providential interest of a kindly president. In Bradley Graham’s account in By His Own Rules:

Undaunted, the thirty-eight-year-old rising star does not hesitate to advise the president how to persuade his secretary of state that, lack of foreign policy experience be damned, Don Rumsfeld is the man for the job:

Apart from the needling references to Bush Sr., the less worthy rival who didmanage to become president, this intense will to triumph and dominate shows in the film’s protagonist only in his studious denials. Morris’s camera struggles with that self-satisfied opacity and so do we, knowing that beneath it, somewhere, lies the bottomless ambition that led Nixon to dub Rumsfeld “a ruthless little bastard.” For Nixon there could be no stronger approbation. To his boss’s acid observation that though “we’ve done a hell of a lot for Rumsfeld…, he’s ready to jump the ship,” H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, replies with the cynical assurance born of having made good use of more than one ruthless little bastard in his day:

That ship was about to founder spectacularly and it was no more than a confirmation of this appraisal that Rumsfeld would gaze on Nixon’s final destruction from a safe distance abroad, having engineered his own appointment as ambassador to NATO, and would remain sufficiently untainted by Watergate to return to serve his fellow midwesterner Gerald Ford as White House chief of staff in his turn, at forty-three years old—his predecessor Haldeman was by then on the way to the federal penitentiary at Lompoc—and finally, as he tells Morris proudly, as “the youngest secretary of defense in history.”

Nearly a quarter-century would pass before George W. would bring him back as the oldest, proving by his willingness to hire his father’s famous rival that, as Rumsfeld tells Morris, the younger Bush “was his own man, made his own decisions”—and proving it again, not long after, by ordering him during that tearful private chat in the Oval Office to “develop a plan to invade Ir” and to “do it creatively.” As for Rumsfeld, the calm, “aw shucks” demeanor was still there, and barely concealed beneath it the driving force of his ambition, which, during a quarter-century mostly spent outside the White House looking in, had only grown.

Nearly two years have passed since the last American soldier crossed the Iraq border into Kuwait, ending in quiet ignominy the American phase of a war that had begun in highly ballyhooed “shock and awe” more than eight years before. In Iraq, the sectarian guerrilla war set off by the invasion goes on, the suicide bombers continue their work, hundreds of Iraqis die in horrific violence every month. That most Americans would prefer to ignore this does not alter the reality that we live in a world the Iraq war has made. Before the war, Iraq had served the United States as a check on the revolutionary ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran—a “tilt” to Iraq that Donald Rumsfeld had personally set on course, during talks with Saddam in Baghdad in 1983 as President Reagan’s special envoy. It took the American invasion two decades later to make of Iraq an Iranian ally.

Under Saddam, Iraq had been devoid of Islamic jihadists; it took the American occupation to make of Iraq a breeding ground for jihadists and a laboratory for developing and honing their techniques of asymmetric warfare: the car bombs, kidnappings, improvised explosive devices, and other ruthless tactics in a cheap and effective “toolbox” that has been employed with considerable success from Afghanistan to Yemen to Mali. Iraqi jihadists, many of them former soldiers and officers in the Iraqi army that the American occupiers abruptly dissolved in the summer of 2003, have become the proud foot soldiers of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” a proclaimed zone of insurgency and Wild West lawlessness that stretches west from Fallujah through Anbar province and into the heart of Sunni Syria.

While the increasingly repressive Shia government that the Americans helped install in Baghdad collaborates with Tehran in its support of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the Sunni insurgents that the Americans unleashed struggle to overthrow Assad in what is becoming the central battle of the three-continent-wide Salafi uprising that al-Qaeda, by its audacious September 11 attacks, had been determined to ignite and foster. Now the Sunnis are increasingly striking back at Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors in Lebanon.

The Sunni–Shia struggle set in motion by the American invasion of Iraq has become the vortex of a violent political struggle that stretches from South Asia to the Gulf. Meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has grown fivefold. Bin Laden is dead, but in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen the drones go on striking, killing by now several thousand, and more rise to take their place. The jihadists are not winning but they are not disappearing either. There is no end in sight.

Though Bush is long gone, replaced by a president who had seemed to voters to be in many ways his opposite, this geopolitical reality has hardly changed. As Rumsfeld remarks to Morris:

One needn’t accept such “validation” to concede that more than a dozen years later we still live in the world that Bush’s “war on terror” made. The “state of exception” that began on September 11, 2001, has not ended, owing not only to the political compromises and misplaced priorities of the Obama administration but to the terribly misbegotten and self-defeating way the “war on terror” was conceived and waged.

It is from this vantage that one must consider the question Donald Rumsfeld posed, in one of his famous “snowflakes”—personal memoranda on white paper that rained down in an unrelenting blizzard on Defense Department officials—with characteristic succinctness and precision:

In its focus on the political reality of the war on terror—on the necessity to deter and dissuade as well as to kill and capture—the memo is concise, perceptive, astute; it is also, coming in October 2003, very, very late. Americans killing Muslims in Baghdad and Fallujah and other cities of Iraq dominate the television screens. The secretary of defense, after stubbornly resisting the word in a trail of nitpicking snowflakes that Morris’s film meticulously follows, can no longer deny that American troops are trying to repress an “insurgency” in Iraq. The images are lurid, indelible: Americans breaking into Muslim homes, pushing Muslim men to the floor with boots to the backs of their heads—and soon, Americans abusing naked Muslims in the garish grotesque prison world of Abu Ghraib.

It is all a great political gift to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and one that keeps on giving: a worldwide live-action recruiting poster, broadcast 24/7, with the Americans seeming to conform with bullheaded enthusiasm to the caricature the Islamists had made of them. More than two years into the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” it was too late to be asking, as Rumsfeld does in the next line of his October 2003 memo:

In fact, this “broad, integrated plan” was unfolding before him and every other television viewer on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah. Rumsfeld had placed it before the president in September 2001, a scant week after their intimate Oval Office meeting, in a memo bearing the portentous title “Strategic Thoughts.” In it, the secretary of defense advises that the administration should “avoid as much as possible creating images of Americans killing Muslims.” This wise admonition, alas, would conflict rather dramatically with his more grandiose “strategic thoughts.” Reading them now, a dozen years into the ongoing “war on terror,” the words carry all the poignancy of a vast heroic hubris come to grief:

It takes little imagination to glimpse looming out of those memorable words “another key State (or two)” the hirsute visage of Saddam Hussein. Making quick work of “liberating” Iraq would be the first move in the Bush administration’s effort to “change the world’s political map,” without which the “US will not achieve its aim.”

This would not be a war in which the president would “send a $2 million missile into a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt” (in Bush’s faux-cowboy dismissal of Bill Clinton’s response to al-Qaeda). It would be a war to remake the world. George W. Bush, with less foreign policy experience than brash young Don Rumsfeld had had in 1971, was ambitious, impatient, confident; he “was his own man, made his own decisions,” and he embraced with enthusiasm his secretary of defense’s mission to “significantly change the world’s political map.” Donald Rumsfeld, experienced, powerful, confident, sharing his president’s ambition and thirst for challenges both, was more than happy to show him the way.

To explain the rapid shifting of the war on terror from attacking the enemy that had attacked the United States, al-Qaeda, to invading the enemy that hadn’t, Iraq, it is not enough to say, quoting Rumsfeld in his notorious response to troops fighting in Iraq in 2004, that “you go to war with the army you have.” (By then the soldiers were begging for “up-armored” Humvees to protect them from the IEDs that were maiming and killing them daily on Iraq’s roads, and the secretary was trying and failing to explain why they didn’t have them.) But if it is true that the post–cold war United States in September 2001 was far and away the world’s preeminent military power, it is also true that its splendid arsenal of high-tech tanks and planes and ships had been designed to fight and win a conventional war, not a counter-insurgency. The US military had last engaged a guerrilla force in Vietnam, and things had not gone well. Memories of this among senior officers remained vivid, and unpleasant.

No army had attacked the United States on September 11. It had been nineteen men, the vanguard of a worldwide insurgency, and if the attacks on New York and Washington had been bold and shocking and outlandish, the goals behind them had been the classic objects of insurgents for millennia: to encourage recruits to join the insurgent cause, to show the vulnerability of the ruling power, and to provoke that power to overreact—to respond to insurgent attacks in such a way that would reveal to the world the regime’s cruelty and repressiveness and so bring the quiescent population (in this case, all Muslims) increasingly over to the insurgents’ side.

Bin Laden had counted on the Americans responding to his attacks in New York and Washington by invading and occupying Afghanistan. (Indeed, to prepare for the expected battle he had dispatched, days before September 11, two suicide bombers disguised as television journalists to assassinate Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.) America’s coming occupation was to produce images of suffering Afghans that would outrage Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco; al-Qaeda would lead the Afghans in a guerrilla war against the Americans, producing a quagmire that would engulf the last superpower, as it had—so the legend went—the Soviet Union before it.

In the event, of course, the Americans offered a gift undreamt of in al-Qaeda’s philosophy: they invaded and occupied Iraq, a much more important country. The result was catastrophe, not only for Iraq but for the Bush administration’s worldwide “war on terror,” for the invasion seemed to brand Bush’s war, in image after bloody humiliating image of “Americans killing Muslims,” as a new Western crusade against the Islamic world, confirming in every newscast the guiding idea of al-Qaeda’s politics and propaganda.

These were the very images Rumsfeld had warned against in his “Strategic Thoughts” memorandum of September 2001; he knew that such images, far from “dissuading and deterring” prospective terrorists, would recruit and nourish them. How was it that he came to preside over a military producing them day after day, month after month? How did the country come to fight, and then badly bungle, precisely the wrong war? Much has been written about the mystery of the Bush administration and its obsession with Iraq. Or rather obsessions, for one could easily construct a typology of these, beginning, first and foremost, with the young evangelical president who already on the evening of the frenzied surreal day after September 11 would confront his counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke in the hallway outside the Situation Room. “He grabbed a few of us,” Clarke writes, “and closed the door.”

Did the president truly believe that Iraq was behind the attacks, or was he looking to find evidence for an invasion he already had in mind? Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy, almost certainly was a true believer and had—to Clarke’s astonishment—insisted on his “Iraq is behind al-Qaeda” theory as early as the previous April, during the administration’s single Deputies Meeting on al-Qaeda. Clarke had ardently and doggedly pushed for this meeting—he was convinced another attack was coming—only to see it collapse into a debate about supposed Iraqi state sponsorship. Even after the September 11 attacks, in the first major “war cabinet” meeting at Camp David that Saturday, Wolfowitz insisted that the war on terror should begin not in Afghanistan but in Iraq:

By this account, Bush eventually grows irritated by Wolfowitz’s persistence, finally declaring, “We are not going after Iraq right this minute. We’re going to go after the people we know did this to us.”

And so they would, dropping the first bomb on Afghanistan on October 7. The American military had not yet become Rumsfeld’s military, with its emphasis on Special Forces; it was CIA officers who led the charge on horseback through Afghanistan, pointing their laser target finders to guide US bombers. Taliban fighters took punishment, then retreated, slipped away; as Wolfowitz had said the targets soon ran out. And when the critical moment came, with Osama bin Laden and much of his al-Qaeda force cornered at Tora Bora, Rumsfeld—so he tells us in his memoir—left the critical decisions to his combatant commander, General Tommy Franks:

Still, “I made it clear to Franks that if he believed he needed more troops, he would get them as quickly as possible,” and “if someone thought bin Laden was cornered, as later claimed, I found it surprising that [Director of Central Intelligence George] Tenet had never called me to urge Franks to support their operation.” We would hear echoes of this in Iraq. As Nixon discovered, the deft shedding of responsibility was a Rumsfeld trademark.

Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan. He would remain defiantly at large, appearing in propaganda videos, for a decade. The Taliban, having fled the wave of heavy bombing that supported the ramshackle advance of the Northern Alliance, would soon begin filtering back into the country. It didn’t matter. Amid the celebration of the victory in Afghanistan, the eyes of the Bush administration had already turned to Iraq.

What would Rumsfeld hope to find there? He had argued that the “war on terror” should “significantly change the world’s political map.” In this belief he was hardly alone. Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld’s old antagonist from the Ford administration, when asked why he supported the Iraq war, had reportedly replied, “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” The radical Islamists had wanted to humiliate us, he went on, “and we need to humiliate them.”3 This was about restoring national credibility, about rebuilding the national power—consisting in no small part of theimage of power—that had been severely diminished by those world-altering real-time pictures of the collapsing towers. Such images must be vanquished, supplanted by those of American tanks rumbling down the streets of an Arab capital.

Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.

Beneath all the trappings of “Rumsfeld’s Rules” and the “Strategic Thoughts” and the cockeyed, self-serving epistemology about unknown knowns and unknown unknowns, one discerns a homespun flag-waving American politician. Morris includes in his film a clip of Rumsfeld at a gathering of former secretaries of defense in 1989, lecturing his predecessors and successors about America’s triumph in the cold war:

The words roll forth, rapid and ardent, an impromptu barn-raiser drawn partly no doubt from his first tour at the Pentagon, and it is evident, as McNamara and Schlesinger and Weinberger and the others look on balefully, that Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable. And it is because of that plain necessity for American leadership that after September 11 American power and credibility must at all costs be restored.

Rumsfeld would offer the “creative” plan for the Iraq invasion that his president had requested that tearful evening in September 2001, one that envisioned a relative handful of troops—150,000, fewer than half the number the elder Bush had assembled a decade before for the much less ambitious Desert Storm—and foresaw an invasion that would begin in shock and awe and an overwhelming rush to Baghdad. As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”

It did not turn out that way. Having watched from the Oval Office in 1975 the last torturous hours of the United States extracting itself from Vietnam—the helicopters fleeing the roof of the US embassy in Saigon—Rumsfeld would be condemned to thrash about in his self-made quagmire for almost four years, sinking ever deeper in the muck as nearly five thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.

And month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary. And even as it became undeniable that Rumsfeld’s war, far from deterring or dissuading prospective terrorists, increasingly inspired and fostered them—that the image of strength and dominance he sought had become one of bumbling and cruelty and weakness—the power of his personality and of his influence over the president meant that for month after month, year after year, he was able to impose his will—and define the world we still see around us.

1
See Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (Free Press, 2004), p. 32. ?
2
See Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (Doubleday, 2013), p. 144. We have known about Wolfowitz’s role in this discussion since Bob Woodward’s Bush at War (Simon and Schuster, 2002) but Baker’s account brings new details. ?
3
See Bob Woodward, State of Denial (Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 408. See also my “Iraq: The War of the Imagination,”The New York Review, December 21, 2006. ?

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