Soccer Dad: The don of dons

November 9, 2006

The don of dons

I know that Donald Rumsfeld isn't a popular fellow these days. Still he's one member of the Bush administration that I've liked since September 11, 2001.

Why September 11?

I remember waiting a while before I heard what happened to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. There were mentions of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Powell. But no mention of Rumsfeld.

I figured that the news wasn't saying anything because the plane that hit the Pentagon had injured him, or worse.

I was very relieved when I heard he was OK.

I don't know when it was that I heard what he was really up to that day. This guy isn't made of the same stuff I am. Nearly 70 years old at the time, he was helping the rescuers getting the injured onto stretchers.

Mr. Rumsfeld was in his office on the third floor of the outer ring when he heard and felt the crash on the other side of the building. The 69- year-old former Navy pilot was jolted and rushed to the scene. "He went outside the building and was helpful in getting several people that were injured onto stretchers," said a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley. "He was out there 15 minutes or so helping the injured."
Then Mr. Rumsfeld headed to the National Military Command Center, the secure operational nerve center below his office, even though it was permeated with smoke. There, Mr. Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and other top military and civilian aides remained sequestered through the day to discuss military options.

I know that personal courage isn't proof that he was doing his job correctly. Still I'm unimpressed with the many complaints against him. He sought to change and changed a bureaucracy around. There were people with interests in keeping things as they were. He was bound to step on lots of toes and bruise lots of egos. There are plenty of long knives out for him and I think that makes many of the criticisms of him suspect.

I read an excerpt of Bob Woodward's book in the Washington Post. In it about five people now take credit for claiming they told Rumsfeld that he didn't have enough troops. But we have no context. Did he have just these five advisors? or did he have more? If he had more people that those five isn't it possible (or even likely) that these five were in the minority and that they were overruled because Rumsfeld got more advice from those who disagreed with their position. Just because a majority of Woodward's self promoting sources foresaw the eventual chaos in Iraq, doesn't mean that everyone did.

There's another reason I'm such a big Rumsfeld fan. It's this news conference.

My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lost of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won.
They have offered up -- successive prime ministers have offered up various portions of that so-called occupied territory, the West Bank, and at no point has it been agreed upon by the other side. I suspect it will be, even in my lifetime, that there will be some sort of an entity that will be established. Maybe it will take some Palestinian expatriates coming back into the region and providing the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick. It may be that the neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and others, will have to assist in providing a degree of accountability.

"So-called occupied territories." I'd be impressed if Israeli government officials used this terminology. And he caught some flack for it, but was unapologetic.

DD: You said it twice in the same series of remarks. You used the expression "so-called".
DR: Fair enough. I was in a meeting, and I was asked a question, and the phrase came out.

DD: But is it what you think that they're so-called occupied, or do you think they're occupied and should be given up?

DR: I think that that's what a negotiation is going to solve. I mean, that is what the negotiation is about. Obviously Israel has offered to give back a major portion of the occupied territories. We know that. The agreement was there. It could have been solved if Arafat had accepted it. He didn't.

DD: But your use of the word "so-called".

DR: If it bothered you, then don't use it.

DD: It's not me it bothers. It's the other Arab states it bothers.

DR: Well, don't you agree that the purpose of a negotiation is to decide those things? It seems to me that's fairly reasonable. Israel has offered to give up a major percentage of the occupied territories.

(Jack Kemp, for what it's worth, had a nice defense of Rumsfeld.)

Finally now that Rumsfeld is out and Gates is apparently in is this a signal of change?

Michael Rubin has questions about Gates.

Had they done so, they might not conclude that the solution in Iraq lies with further engagement of Iran and Syria. Rather than inject a "new approach" to U.S. strategy, the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendations resurrect the old. In May 2001, Hamilton co-chaired an Atlantic Council study group that called on Washington to adopt a "new approach" to Iran centered on engagement with Tehran. And, in 2004, Baker-Hamilton Commission member Robert M. Gates co-chaired another study group that called for a "new approach" toward Iran consisting of engagement.
The problem is that this "new approach" hasn't been good for U.S. national security. After Secretary of State Madeleine Albright extended an olive branch to the Islamic Republic in March 2000, the Iranian leadership facilitated anti-U.S. terrorists. As the 9/11 Commission found, "There is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers."

It's been known that some time after the election President Bush was going to look into the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group after the eleciton. Dr. Gates was a member of the ISG, so it makes sense that he would be brought into government in some capacity.

But it looks like the administration isn't just considering a new course in Iraq, but that it might be considering going back to the old ways of thinking about foreign policy.

Source: Cheney stuck by Rumsfeld

But a source told NBC News� military analyst Bill Arkin that prior to the election, Vice President Dick Cheney argued with other politicians over whether Rumsfeld should stay. White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and others said Rumsfeld should be removed, the source said. Both sides agreed the decision would be made after the election, when Bush would make the final call based on how Republicans did.

According to the source, Bush agreed Rumsfeld should be removed after seeing election results favoring Democrats. Cheney then lost another argument, protesting Gates� nomination as Rumsfeld�s replacement.

Despite the absurdity of the charge, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been called the administration's "neo-conservatives." If Cheney wanted someone else and was overruled, it's one more sign that Gates's ally James Baker is gaining influence.

Not surprisingly David Ignatius likes the change.

Robert Gates will bring to the job the attentive style of a listener. He rose at the CIA in the 1980s by making himself indispensable to his boss, William Casey. He was the brightest Soviet analyst in the shop, so Casey soon appointed him deputy director overseeing his fellow analysts. I once waded through Gates's graduate dissertation for his doctorate in Soviet studies at Georgetown. It was a work of solid, earnest scholarship -- good, but not flashy. Rumsfeld might have described it as a long, hard slog. But it illustrates Gates's best qualities: his intellectual seriousness, his professionalism, his lack of "side," as the British say of good civil servants.

Gates represents the return of Bush 41 people and ideas to the Bush 43 administration. The elder Bush rescued Gates after he was rejected as CIA director in 1987 because of his role in the Iran-contra scandal, bringing him to the National Security Council staff and then appointing him CIA director in 1991. Gates is not a turfy person -- he works well with others -- a quality that Rumsfeld often lacked.

I am not happy with this change, though it may well have been politically necessary.

UPDATE: KesherTalk has a nice roundup of thoughts on Rumsfeld. (h/t Boker Tov Boulder)

Here is the record of Donald Rumsfeld. (1) Tried to take a top-heavy Pentagon and prepare it for the wars of the postmodern world, in which on a minute�s notice thousands of American soldiers, with air and sea support, would have to be sent to some god-awful place to fight some savagery�and then be trashed live on CNN for doing it; (2) less than a month after 9/11 he organized the retaliation against al Qaeda in the heart of primordial Afghanistan that removed the Taliban in 7 weeks, when we were all warned that the U.S., like the British and Russians of old, would fail; (3) oversaw the removal of Saddam in 3 weeks�after the 1991 Gulf War and the 12-years of 350,000 sorties in the no-fly-zones, and various bombing strikes, had failed. (4) Ah, you say, then there is the disastrous 3-year insurgency�too few troops, Iraqi army let go, underestimated �dead-enders� etc.?

But Rumsfeld knew that in a counterinsurgency (cf. Vietnam 1965-71) massive deployments only ensure complacency, breed dependency, and create resentment, and that, in contrast, training indigenous forces, ensuring political autonomy, and providing air and commando support (e.g., Vietnam circa 1972-4) is the only answer�although that is a long process that can work only if political support at home allows the military to finish the job (cf. the turn-of-the-century Philippines, and the British in Malaysia). He was a good man, and we were lucky to have him in our hour of need.

Victor Davis Hanson defends Rumsfeld's record.

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