[For complete article links, please see original: http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/index.mhtml?pid=165346 - lex]
In
1976, when Jimmy Carter took the Presidency from Gerald Ford, outgoing
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went off to seek corporate wealth as
head of G.D. Searle, a Skokie pharmaceutical company. His period
running the business, inherited by the family of his North Shore friend
and early backer Dan Searle, would become part of Rumsfeld's legend of
success as a master manager, negligently accepted as fact by the media
and Congressional representatives at his 2001 confirmation hearings.
The
legend went this way: Political prodigy slashes payroll 60%, turns
decrepit loser into mega-profit-maker, earns industry kudos and
multiple millions. In looking at men of prominence like Rumsfeld who
revolve in and out of the private sector, the Washington media almost
invariably adopts the press-release or booster business-page version of
events from what inside-the-Beltway types call "the real world." In
Rumsfeld's case, behind the image of corporate savior lay a far more
relevant and ominous history.
In the documented version of
reality, derived from litigation and relatively obscure investigations
in the U.S. and abroad, Searle turned out to enjoy its notable rise
less thanks to Rumsfeldian innovative managerial genius than to
old-fashioned reckless marketing of pharmaceuticals already on the
shelf and the calling in of lobbying "markers" via its well-connected
Republican CEO. And over it all wafted the distinctive odor of corrupt
practices. A case in point was Searle's anti-diarrhea medicine Lomotil,
sold ever more widely and profitably internationally (in industry terms
"dumped") -- especially in Africa in the late 1970s -- despite the
company's failure to warn of its potentially dire effects on younger
children.
"A blindly harmful stopcock," one medical journal
called the remedy, which could be poisonous to infants only slightly
above Searle's recommended dosage. Even taken according to directions,
Lomotil was known to mask dangerous dehydration and cause a lethal
build-up of fluids internally. Having advertised the medicine as "ideal
for every situation," Searle did not undertake a cautionary labeling
change until the end of 1981, nearly five years into Rumsfeld's tenure,
and then only when threatened with damaging publicity by children's
advocacy groups. Part of the vast outrage of multinational "pharmas"
exploiting the Third World, the company under Rumsfeld would, like the
more publicized Upjohn with its Depo-Provera, be implicated in
widespread bribery of officials (and others) in poorer countries to
promote the sale of oral contraceptives which had been found unsafe for
American or European women.
But Searle's magic potion,
concocted well before Rumsfeld's arrival, was to be the controversial
artificial sweetener aspertame, marketed under the trade name
NutraSweet. By 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had
staunchly refused to approve aspertame for some 16 years, finding test
data dubious or inconclusive and fearing that potential long-term
dangers might prove prohibitive. As Rumsfeld took over in Skokie, the
FDA was taking the rare step of recommending to Justice Department
prosecutors that a grand jury investigate the company's applications
for FDA approval for "willful and knowing failure to make reports…
concealing material facts and making false statements" in connection
with the statutory application process required by law and FDA
standards.
Over the next four years, federal regulators held
firm against Searle's heavily financed campaigns. Only with Reagan's
election in 1980 did fix and favor supplant science and the public
interest. Having campaigned for the new president and been named to his
transition team, Rumsfeld told his Searle sales force, according to
later testimony, that "he would call in all his markers and that no
matter what, he would see to it that aspartame would be approved…"
The
sequel would be a classic of the genre: Searle's reapplication to the
FDA the day Reagan was inaugurated; the prompt appointment of an
agreeable FDA commissioner who would later go to work for Searle's
public relations firm for $1,000 a day; further questionable,
company-commissioned tests with more doubts by FDA scientists but
approval of aspertame nonetheless; a later plague of health problems
but by then vast profits throughout the corporate food economy followed
by lavish, multi-company contributions to Congressional committee
members to stifle any outcry; eventually, a $350 million class-action
suit alleging racketeering, fraud, and multiple abuses centering on
Rumsfeld, who meanwhile had become gloriously rich from aspertame and
the $2.7-billion sale of Searle to Monsanto in 1985.
Rumsfeld began his
Pentagon reprise by seizing on a dead Russian marshal and an
octogenarian Washington bureaucrat few had ever heard of.
In his
return to the Pentagon in 2001, he would go duly unscathed by any of
the company's history. By the time litigation would be filed, the
United States was already 18 months into the occupation of Iraq.
Envoy
As
it was, despite his business conquests, Rumsfeld missed an even greater
prize. He had been on a short list to become Ronald Reagan's running
mate in the 1980 presidential campaign when the candidate unexpectedly
reached for his defeated primary rival (and Rumsfeld nemesis) George
H.W. Bush. While, over the next 12 years, Bush went on to the
vice-presidency and presidency, and Jim Baker -- equally detested by
Rumsfeld -- went along with his patron to White House staff and cabinet
power, Rumsfeld would build his Searle fortune and bide his time.
The
one exception to his involuntary Reagan-era exile from government would
be a stint in 1983-1984 as special presidential envoy to the Middle
East. He would be sent to arrange U.S. support for Saddam Hussein's
Iraq in its war with the hated Iranians of Ayatollah Khomeini, a role
little noticed at the time which nonetheless produced the notorious
photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Iraqi dictator. The deeper
story was far more embarrassing than any simple handshake.
Most
of the relevant records on Rumsfeld's several-month assignment are
still classified, though it is clear that, as at the Office of Equal
Opportunity (OEO), he took on his mission with a passion. He worked to
shower on Saddam (in a manner as unnoticed as possible) an infamous
flow of intelligence, financial credits, and sensitive materials and
technology that would come to underpin Iraqi chemical and
bacteriological warfare programs, leading to hideous gas attacks on
Shia dissidents and Kurds as well as the Iranian forces. In general,
Rumsfeld put his shoulder to the wheel to shore up the war-worn
Ba'athist regime that had attacked Iran in 1980.
In this
mid-1980s de facto alliance with Saddam, as in much else, Rumsfeld was
never alone. He was joined in this pro-Iraqi tilt in the Middle East by
President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George
Shultz, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, National Security Advisors
William Clark and Robert McFarlane, and a number of still obscure men
like Paul Wolfowitz at State, Colin Powell, then Weinberger's aide at
the Pentagon, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, not to
speak of his zealot acolyte assistant Douglas Feith (who would return
in a pivotal post under Rumsfeld in 2001) as well as Bill Casey and
Robert Gates at the CIA, among other officials.
Their gambit
was, in turn, backed by Senators and Congressmen in both parties who
were briefed on Rumsfeld's mission and obligingly shunned oversight of
the manifold aspects of the sometimes illegal collusion with the
Iraqis. Their dereliction was assured, in part, by the general animus
toward Iran on a Capitol Hill then effectively controlled by the
Republicans, and increasingly under the bipartisan influence of the
growing Israeli lobby and its Tel Aviv handlers. The lobby quietly,
cynically pushed both for Reagan administration aid to Iraq and for
covert arms-dealing with Iran (later exposed in the Iran-Contra
scandal), viewing the ongoing no-winners carnage of two Islamic states
as a boon. All this went on largely unreported, given the customary
media diffidence or indolence on national security issues.
Historically,
the moral outrage and far-reaching political folly of Washington's
furtive arming of one tyranny to bleed another, with untold casualties
on each side (including the murderous suppression of would-be democrats
in both countries), would belong at the doorstep of Reagan's
reactionary regime and the Washington foreign-policy establishment as a
whole. Rumsfeld's role was instrumental and in some respects crucial,
but only part of the larger disgrace.
At the same time, in the
intelligence briefings he received as the first ranking U.S. official
to go to Iraq since the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s, he would have been
uniquely aware, as no other senior figure in Washington, of the brutal
character of Saddam Hussein's regime and, in particular, the sectarian,
regional, tribal, and clan politics that lay behind it. The Ba'athists
were a government, after all, that the CIA itself had helped to recruit
and install in the coup of 1963, reinstalled in 1968 when the Agency's
original clients lost control, and then watched closely while Baghdad
had a flirtation (involving an arms-supply relationship) with the
feared Russians (whose influence the bloody 1963 coup was supposed to
counter). This was particularly true in the aftermath of the
Arab-Israeli War of 1973 with its peace agreements from which Iraq
emerged as a principal remaining challenge to Israel.
By
1983-1984, the volatile, complex currents of Iraq's political culture,
Saddam's essentially family and clan rule, and the now crude, now
subtle layering of Sunni and Shia in the Ba'athist bureaucracy and
plutocracy, as well as the wartime distrust and savage repression of a
suspect, subordinate Shia majority, were well known to outside
intelligence agencies as well as scholars and journalists. The CIA, DIA
and State Department Bureaus of Near Eastern Affairs and Intelligence
and Research -- and certainly Rumsfeld as presidential envoy -- also
had reason to understand much about Saddam's grandiose ambition, in
Iraq's old rivalry with Egypt, to lead a pan-Arab nationalist
renaissance to some kind of future parity with Israel's nuclear-armed
military might.
In addition to the usual extensive
intelligence-sharing with Israel's Mossad, less than two years before
Rumsfeld's Iraq mission CIA operatives had literally lit the way for
Israeli F-16 fighter bombers in their June 1981 surprise attack on
Saddam's fledgling nuclear reactor at Osiraq. They planted guidance
transmitters along the low-level flight path under Jordanian and Iraqi
radar to the point of painting the target with lasers. The Agency and
Mossad then watched as the Iraqis dauntlessly, defiantly began to
rebuild and expand their nuclear program. From some 400 scientists and
technicians with $400 million in funding, that program would grow to
perhaps 7,000 scientists and technicians with as much as $10 billion at
their command, some of which was indirectly made possible by the bounty
Rumsfeld carried to Baghdad in the mid-1980s
For anyone
dealing seriously with these issues, there could have been little doubt
that Saddam would use the considerable aid and trade Rumsfeld was
sliding his way under the table to mount a better-armed, more bloody
war on Iran, to further the regime's most ambitious dreams of weapons
development, and to tyrannize all the more savagely potentially
rebellious Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. As Washington watched, he did all
of that -- and no one could have been less surprised than Rumsfeld
himself. Long afterward, as some of the ugly essence of his mission to
Baghdad dribbled out amid the ruins of Bush's Iraqi occupation,
Rumsfeld would be faulted for pandering to, and appeasing, Saddam
(whose gassing of the Kurds had already begun) -- in the wake of a
single, timorous, hypocritical statement issued in Washington in March
1984 criticizing his use of chemical weapons. The actual toll of the
policy to which he was integral would prove so much higher as time
passed.
Iraqi chemical weapons plants bombed in the 1991 Gulf
War released agents to which some 100,000 American troops were exposed.
The infamous Gulf War Syndrome might evend be traced in some measure to
the U.S. credits, materiel, and technology Rumsfeld knowingly conveyed
seven years before. So, too, of course, could Saddam's brutal 1980s
repression of the Shia, underlying the sectarian animus and resolve for
vengeance and dominance by the U.S.-installed Shia regime after 2003
that shaped Rumsfeld's, and America's, historic failure in Iraq.
Others
colluded at every turn in the long scandal of policy toward Iraq. Colin
Powell, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Dick Cheney, as
Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War, would, for instance, be
directly complicit in the Syndrome outrage. Yet none of the
participants in the larger post-9/11 disaster was more directly
responsible than Rumsfeld.
While Reagan's special envoy was,
with his usual energy and sharp elbows, dickering with the Iraqis in
the mid-1980s, Condoleezza Rice was an assistant professor of no
scholarly distinction at Stanford; Cheney a third-term congressman from
Wyoming squirming up the House leadership ladder; future viceroy of
Baghdad L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer moving from State Department clerk and
Alexander Haig protégé to lavish-party giving ambassador to the
Netherlands; and George W. Bush, still by his own account given to
"heavy drinking," absorbed in changing the name of his chronically
failed Arbusto Energy oil company to Bush Exploration.
Waiting Game
By
1987, Rumsfeld was flexing his muscles once more, preparing for the
ultimate goal, assembling money and party support for a presidential
run against George H. W. Bush in 1988. But after a dozen years out of
office, and against the entrenched power of an heir apparent, he would
soon enough discover that backing just was not there. Off more recent
prominence and with a wider political base, Cheney would try to mount
his own presidential campaign in the early 1990s, only to meet the same
bitter rejection
Historians will only guess at the rancor
building in these two deeply ambitious, deeply disappointed figures at
the president they had, George W. Bush, whom they no doubt saw as
manifestly, maddeningly inferior. The Rumsfeld-Cheney recompense, at
vast cost to the nation and world, would be their fierce seizure of
power after September 11, 2001.
Rumsfeld spent the 1990s again
in business, becoming CEO of General Instruments, then Chairman of
Gilead Sciences Pharmaceuticals, with another history reminiscent of
Searle. In 1990, he joined the board of ABB, a Swedish-Swiss
conglomerate that had gobbled up companies in the latter 1980s,
including Westinghouse energy operations, and would move aggressively
to win a $200-million contract for "the design and key components" for
light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea. Rumsfeld pursued this
prize even while chairing a Congressional commission on missile threats
that found a "clear danger" for the future from Pyongyang. In the
alarming report, his otherwise fulsome résumé failed to mention that he
was an ABB director.
In 1996, he took leave from Gilead to
become chief foreign policy advisor, along with Wolfowitz, in Robert
Dole's failed presidential run. He would end as the campaign's
eighteen-hour-a-day manager. By 1997, amid the full-scale takeover of
the Washington GOP by the long-churning cabal of neoconservatives, he
joined Cheney and Wolfowitz on a Newt Gingirch-instigated Congressional
Policy Advisory Board to shape attacks on the second Clinton
Administration.
In January 1998, he signed the celebrated
letter so publicly sent to Clinton from the right-wing, Israeli
lobby-dominated Project for a New American Century. Alongside
Wolfowitz, Perle, and others soon to be key players in the younger
Bush's regime, he vigorously urged the "removal" of Saddam. In July
1998, there followed the "Rumsfeld Commission" report on missile
threats, wildly claiming, in an unnamed debut of the "axis of evil"
drawn from the testimony and staff work of right-wing ideologues, that
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea would each be able to "inflict major
destruction" on the U.S. by 2002. Through it all, including the first
seven-and-a-half months of their rule after the seamy election of 2000,
there would be no trace of the actual danger that erupted out of a
September morning sky in 2001.
Though he had repaired surface
relations with the Bushes, Rumsfeld took no major role in the 2000
race. In any case, the elder Bush had erased him from his son's list of
possible running mates, while ultimately waving through Cheney, whose
reactionary animus had been relatively well masked at the Pentagon in
1989-92. When, post-election, Cheney vetoed Governor Tom Ridge for the
Pentagon, and there were throbbing neocon fears that a cosmetic Powell,
bureaucrat at heart, would be far too equivocal at the State
Department, Rumsfeld would be Cheney's, and so Bush's, antidote.
His
appointment was a mark of the extreme poverty of Republican talent the
administration reflected so graphically. The supposed party of national
security, having held the White House for five of the last eight terms
and dominated Congress for much of the previous 30 years, had no
serious alternative to a man who had perched atop the Pentagon a full
quarter-century before. Apart from the patently right-wing, widely
discredited missile panel he had chaired, Rumsfeld had shown no
palpable interest or competence in the ever more complex defense issues
accumulating since then, much less the rapidly changing politics of the
post-Cold War world. Nonetheless, fit, relatively youthful at 69, he
strode again into the E-Ring. There was speculation that the old
Halloween Massacre goal was still there, that Cheney, with his
uncertain health, might step aside in 2004, that the undertaker might
yet reach the Oval Office.
Mastery
Rumsfeld began his
Pentagon reprise by seizing on a dead Russian marshal and an
octogenarian Washington bureaucrat few had ever heard of.
Like
Osama bin Laden, steely-haired Nikolai Ogarkov first came to light
during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. In 1977, at 50, he had become a
prodigal chief of the Soviet General Staff. In that superannuated,
medal-mummified company, he proved a dynamic, technically inclined,
forward-thinking young general. Over the ensuing years, he would be an
impressive Moscow spokesman on arms control, and defend stubbornly,
even abjectly, the 1983 shooting down of a civilian Korean Airlines 747
that had veered into Soviet air space.
Ogarkov would fall from
power in a 1984 Kremlin struggle over weapons spending, write a
valedictory book warning of American militarism, and die in post-Soviet
obscurity in 1994. But his main, if esoteric, historical distinction
would lie in a slight 1982 pamphlet in which he blamed the early,
nearly lethal Russian defeats in World War II on a failure to adapt to
the new German blitzkrieg concepts in tank warfare. Recent U.S.
advances in weapons technology, he argued, could leave the Russians
similarly vulnerable if they didn't adapt quickly enough.
Sweeping
changes in tactics and arms as well as more agile, responsive armed
forces were needed to face the American challenge, the Marshal advised.
Otherwise, Soviet forces would fall into a series of devastating traps
on a future remote-targeted battlefield in which the enemy would
utilize the latest computerized surveillance and information systems in
a new form of high-tech warfare. His vision soon gained vogue as much
in Washington as amid the stultified upper reaches of the Soviet
military of the early 1980s. It was grandly christened -- and welcomed
by Pentagon aficionados -- as the "Revolution in Military Affairs" or,
in that acronym-laden world, RMA.
There was a certain banality
to Ogarkov's stress on technology. That a fighting force should be best
attuned to the battlefield and adversary of the moment -- modern,
adaptable, quick, and informed -- should have been self-evident, on the
order of the bloody lesson 80 years before of the Tsarist cavalry
charging entrenched machine guns in the Russo-Japanese War. Yet however
obvious the premise, the RMA concept -- transported to the Pentagon and
put in the context of an onrushing generation of electronic warfare, of
near-nuclear effects with non-nuclear means, along with Ogarkov's call
for fresh tactics (and thus new weaponry and higher spending) -- was
taken up by innovators, opportunists, and their assorted hybrids on
both sides of the Cold War.
This was particularly so among the
Soviets, whose rusty Europe-heavy military was already being shaken and
bled in Afghanistan by the Mujahideen -- in 1982-1983, despite ample
Saudi money, still only partially armed by their cynical CIA,
Pakistani, and Chinese handlers. At any rate, Ogarkov's truism was also
grist for the Pentagon's back-ring band of civilian military
"theorists," career bureaucrats ever in search of a mission and
occupationally disposed to attribute evil genius -- requiring a
suitable Washington budgetary response -- to the Red Menace.
Short,
bald, and with stylishly severe wire-rimmed glasses, Andrew Marshall
was a Dickensian clerk of a man who took up the bureaucratic cudgel RMA
represented and brought it down inside the Pentagon. An economist by
training, he had begun at RAND as an analyst in the late 1940s, when
Rumsfeld was still in New Trier High School. Marshall was archetypical
in the career-making fear and folly of the U.S.-Russian mirror-image
rivalry. He had been a protégé of think-the-unthinkable, World War III
theorist Herman Kahn, and then, via Henry Kissinger's mentor Fritz
Kraemer, had gone to work for Kissinger at the National Security
Council (NSC) in the first Nixon term. In 1973, he moved on to the
Pentagon where he presided over his own obscure nest, the Office of Net
Assessment, from Rumsfeld I to II, while gradually gaining the
reputation of resident genius of new war methods.
Discreet
guru to reactionaries, ignored but thought untouchable by Democrats
when in power, Marshall looked on as the Joint Chiefs not only spied on
Kissinger's arms control negotiations with the Russians, but also
played an ardent supporting role in Nixon's fall. He subsequently
signed on to Rumsfeld I's denial of defeat in Vietnam and then, on
RMA's advent, used the concept to evoke ominous fears of a new Kremlin
military prowess, justifying the orgy of Pentagon spending that took
place during the Reagan era. (Ironically, of course, Ogarkov in 1982
was arguing for a Russian response to a still largely prospective
American escalation of weaponry and warfare.) While the U.S. armaments
spree of the 1980s paid for some new RMA developments, most of the
expenditures fit snugly within the corrupt, obtuse old Cold War system,
with America's armed forces tailored to a lumbering Soviet threat in
Europe, and no serious anticipation of the neo-insurgency wars that
actually lay ahead.
As Marshall toyed with "flexibility" --
and the Joint Chiefs cherry-picked his conjuring of Moscow's might for
their own budgetary purposes, while ignoring the real import, and
limits, of RMA -- the Cold War ended in the equivocations and evasions
of Bill Clinton's two terms in office and the low-rent,
self-congratulatory installing of mafia regimes in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The gnome-like Marshall, well past retirement but a lionized witness
before the missile-threat commission, hung on for Rumsfeld's return.
The
resulting history is far too close for much documented detail, though
its silhouette is plain enough. Summoning Marshall as soothsayer,
Rumsfeld made RMA the logo of his determination to gain managerial
dominance over the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon bureaucracy, exactly
the opportunity he thought he had missed 25 years earlier. Under the
old banner of a clash between a brave, beleaguered secretary of defense
and the recalcitrant brass astride an impossible, "glandular" system,
he held up the all-purpose, all-seasons ideal of Pentagon "reform."
That "reform" movement was to be his ultimate takedown, his claim to
greatness, and perhaps -- who knew in 2001 -- one last shot at the
presidency.
Amid the inevitable claims of "streamlining" and
"modernizing," Democrats applauded and reporters gushed reflexively
about Rumsfeld as a celebrity CEO and national quipster. The willing
ignorance, denial, careless trust, or craven acquiescence that marked
the essential submissiveness of the political and media culture to
Rumsfeld's rule were only part of a larger, thoughtless national
abdication of judgment and responsibility in the wars he would propel
in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In blindly striking out after
9/11 -- a reflexive, grandly opportunistic, richly self-satisfying
political act in America -- without seriously understanding the
politics or history of either country, he plunged the Pentagon into
blundering, plundering occupations that made the nightmares of 2007 and
beyond nearly inevitable.
That was the price -- in the utter
absence of serious dialogue in the 2000 election or the first eight
months of 2001 -- of the original uncontested surrender of
foreign-policy power and initiative to such evident presidential
incompetence (including the shocking ineptitude of NSC Advisor
Condoleezza Rice and her staff) and the long predictable
Rumsfeld-Cheney dominance. All of it was plain in Washington soon after
George W. Bush's arrival in the Oval Office; none of it was then
questioned, much less challenged, by Congress, the remnant foreign
policy establishment, or the mainstream media. No democratic process so
completely failed a test of substance as America's after 9/11. No
ensuing catastrophe was more consensual.
History will unravel
only slowly Rumsfeld's relationship to the neocons, who dominated the
middle and upper reaches of his Pentagon, a relationship more complex
than contemporary hagiographies or demonologies have had it.
Historically, he was their ally, patron, legitimizing figurehead, but
never really of them, never a fellow ideologue, dogmatist, or slavish
adherent to much of what they pursued. In enlisting Wolfowitz, Perle
and their train, he would use them, much as he used Marshall, as he had
used so many before, as a means to what was so largely a personal,
megalomaniacal end. But that use, too, was characteristically heedless
of substance and cost.
He opened government as never before to
men who habitually, automatically assumed that U.S. and Israeli
interests were identical, with no objectivity about American policy in
a Middle East they scarcely understood to begin with. Their ignorance
and presumption were matched only by their zeal to cluster in decisive
quarters of the new Bush regime where decisions of grand strategy, of
war and peace, were now shaped and predetermined.
"Like cancer
cells," as eyewitness, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiakowski, would
describe them in action in Rumsfeld's Defense Department. Half-educated
and fanatically loyal to the rote Israeli lobby view of the Middle East
and the larger neocon craze for American post-Cold War global hegemony,
they crowded the domains of the number three official at the Pentagon,
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose career was a
model of their kind and whose notorious Office of Special Plans was
created as a fount for the fraudulent intelligence spurring the
invasion of Iraq.
Historians will debate, too, the obvious
blurred allegiance of what some call these American "Likudniks" with
their utter conformity to the belligerent ultra-Zionist mentality of
the Israeli right. Never before -- not even in the post-World War II
heyday of the powerful China Lobby with its formidable grip on Capitol
Hill but not within the upper reaches of the Executive itself -- had so
many of such uncritical adherence to the policies of a foreign power
been so well placed in Washington.
As often in American
politics and government, however, no conspiracies were necessary,
though a Pentagon-Israeli lobby spy scandal has yet to be played out.
Unrelieved substantive shallowness, a perversely narrow sociology of
knowledge, long-jockeyed-for power and career advancement, a grandiose
parochial vision of a Pax Americana world nursed in a hundred forgotten
think-tank papers and incestuous conferences -- all that as well
imposed a stifling, disastrous orthodoxy on the administration.
Not
least, they operated without the need to support their prejudices or
delusions in authentic high-level debate, flourishing in their
members-only domains of the Pentagon, the NSC Staff, and the State
Department, enjoying exclusive channels of communication to the White
House controlled by Cheney, and unchallenged under a President of
uniquely closed mind.
As for Rumsfeld's relations with his
generals, the subject of veiled accusations of his heedlessness to
dissent or running roughshod over warnings of serious problems, we
actually know very little. The calamity in Iraq has brought more public
criticism by senior officers than any other war in American history,
including Vietnam, but almost all of it hurled from the relatively safe
seats of two-and three-star retirement -- and forlornly after the fact.
This much is clear: No major Pentagon leaks, the time-honored
Washington weapon of dissenting commanders, marked the run-up to the
invasion. There have been no public resignations in protest of his
policies. And the negligence, incompetence, and inertia of commanders
in recognizing and coping with the insurgency, in dealing with scandals
of prisoner abuse, inadequate equipment and more, have been all too
obvious. There is no evidence that any ranking American officer on duty
pressed an intellectual or moral challenge to the unfolding debacle --
even after it was too glaring to be ignored. As in so much else in his
long record, Rumsfeld enjoyed, by Washington's inimitable mix of
careerism and cowardice, submission and opportunism, a large supporting
cast in his folly.
Takedown
In the exhilarating dash
to Baghdad in 2003, none of the admiring gallery seemed to notice that
Rumsfeld's "new" military was largely the old one, "reformed" in name
only; nor did many note that the vaunted lean, mean machine of RMA and
the again-lionized Marshall had no grasp of how profoundly political
was the act of overthrowing 40 years of Ba'athist rule; how deeply
political was the campaign to which so many American lives, so much of
the country's material and symbolic national treasures, would be
committed.
Rumsfeld would take his victory tour in the Gulf
that spring as if circling the mat after a stunningly swift pin. What
was his toughest call, trailing reporters asked --part of the
traditional garlands of victory tossed his way -- and how did he "feel"
at such a victorious moment?
It was hardly the time for the
media, the seemingly omnipotent military, or the rest of government and
the political culture to reflect on how much "shock and awe" depended
on overwhelming force brought down on the near-defenseless, on how much
the concept reeked of racism and colonial pretense – of natives on the
scene and in the vicinity "shocked and awed" like Zulus pounded and
panicked by the Queen's own latest howitzers.
It was far too
early for other questions -- about a force cosseted at the end of
vulnerable supply lines, nicely photogenic in night goggles but without
enough body armor; about acronyms like IED that had yet to enter the
vocabularies of either commanders or reporters; about the familiar
chase for medals and the absence of an enemy admitting defeat and ready
to surrender (a missing essential of "victory" that would have much
worried Maxwell Taylor).
Unreformed, uninformed commanders,
uninstructed beyond brief battles, led their charges into Iraq relying
on their generals. The generals relied on civilians. The civilians
relied on (or were seduced or bullied by) the neocons. The neocons
relied on their own ersatz expertise, Mossad insiders, and Iraqi exiles
long out of touch with their homeland. The exiles -- holed up in
Baghdad palaces with U.S.-paid-for mercenary guards, ignorant and
contemptuous of the Iraq that had passed them by, and where they were
now powerless, even with the might of the Pentagon behind them --
relied on the Americans.
Rumsfeld, as always, relied on
himself. The ranks trusted him -- and political decision-makers -- to
know and manage post-Saddam politics in Iraq to secure the victory as
well as to provide the political setting that fulfilled the military
triumph. When they failed miserably, condemning the American force to a
corrupt, untenable occupation and slow-wasting attrition of men and
prestige, the debacle was complete.
Beyond Iraq were his other lasting legacies.
As
no other cabinet officer in history, he turned over crucial,
self-sustaining functions of his department to privateers and private
armies. He surrendered vital supply and commissariat services for the
American military to profit-plundering contractors for whom U.S. forces
were neither fellow warriors, nor even share-holders, but captive
"customers" to be treated with the offhandedness afforded by guaranteed
contracts. He ceded security and combat functions essential to the
national mission to a corps of thousands of hired guns whose
qualifications, standards of conduct and ultimate loyalty -- all
integral to the safety and success of American forces -- were beyond
effective governmental control or measure. (Exposed in a Congressional
hearing February 7, the scandal of the infamous Blackwell Security
Corporation, shirking amid vast profit the arming and protection of its
own ranks, would be only a glimpse of the larger disgrace.)
Not
since the British hired hordes of Hessians to crush George Washington's
revolutionary army had a military force tracing to America been so
utterly mercenary. The potential direct and indirect levy on policy and
the armed forces would not be known for years.
As no other
cabinet officer in history, he squandered the integrity of his
department and the unique, indispensable code of honor of its services.
He joined, and often led, the rest of an intellectually degraded
administration, heedless of Constitutional and human rights, in
violating the very heart of their ostensibly conservative convictions.
With the ready sanctioning, and then de facto cover-up of torture and
abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the less noticed but equally
gruesome prisons at Bagram Air Base and elsewhere in Afghanistan, he
changed, for untold millions, the symbol of America and its once-proud
military from freedom and the rule of law to the unforgettable
prisoner's hood and shackles. Rumsfeld's impact would not vanish with
terms of office or elections. By the very nature of contracts,
personnel practices, and imparted ethics -- some of Washington's most
permanent monuments -- his legacies would remain deep in the tissue and
soul of the institution he was entrusted to lead. At the end, a
pathetic climax to his more than four decades either in government or
imploringly on its threshold, there was only his hackneyed memo on Iraq
policy -- leaked, even more pathetically, in an apparent attempt
somehow to vindicate him after all.
Thus, he growled that the
Iraqi regime, like some seedy wrestling team, should "pull up its
socks"; and, most poignantly, ever the politician conducting lethal
policy as politics, he advised that Washington "announce that whatever
new approach the US decides on, the US is doing so on a trial basis.
This will give us the ability to re-adjust and move to another course,
if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"
As he left office for
the last time, it would be only the loss that mattered. As a
pathologically unfit president struggled to recoup his historic
blunder, as the neocons and Israeli lobby pressed on a gullible media
and restive but still captive Congress the myth of an Iranian nuclear
threat, as the Navy and Air Force, lesser actors in the Iraq action,
promised wondrous results in Persia, the chaos and ineffable danger
were left to Robert Gates, the puffy courtier.
Weeks after
Rumsfeld's departure, history -- the little ever really known or
understood -- was already being waved off, forgotten. The past was too
complicated and troublesome, too guilt-ridden and close to home, too
filled with chilling consequences.
The worst of it was the
most basic and damning. Donald Rumsfeld and all he represented, all he
did and did not do, came out of us. The undertaker's tally, including
Iraq, was compiled at our leave, one way or another, at every turn. His
tragedy was always ours.
Here's a classic Rumsfeldism: "We do have a saying in America: if you're in a hole, stop digging ... erm, I'm not sure I should have said that." In Part 2 of his historical excavation of the life and world of Donald Rumsfeld (not to speak of the worlds of both President Bushes, the neocons, the U.S. military, the GOP, and an indolent media), Roger Morris, already deep in that hole, just keeps digging away. In doing so, he offers us the rest of Rumsfeld's long march to power, his lasting legacies, and the costly lessons of this comeback kid. So much that went unheeded in the years in which Rumsfeld once again scaled the heights of power is now, thanks to Morris, compactly on the record. 
