Rumsfeld at his best! Donald Rumsfeld attempts to help a Pentagon press corps that cannot help itself
"Back off," indeed.
redstate.com
By AcademicElephant
On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a press briefing at the Pentagon. Mr. Rumsfeld briefs the press fairly frequently, so in and of itself this was not a remarkable occurrence, but last week was a week of significant briefings. The head of CENTCOM and the ambassador to Iraq briefed live from Baghdad. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed alone. The President had a press briefing. And then the Secretary of Defense. These events were not isolated phenomena; the point of the program was to give the prime architects and implementers of Iraq policy opportunities to discuss how that policy is formed and explain the progress that is being made towards a free and independent Iraq.
All the briefings were interesting; one thing they had in common was the intensity with which these various principals argued their position. Their individual styles are different, but none of them appeared to have any personal doubt about what we are doing and why we are doing it in Iraq. General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad are not simply following orders with which they secretly disagree. General Pace is no mere "parrot on the shoulder of the Secretary." Mr. Bush claimed responsibility for Iraq, and argued passionately for the mission. And Mr. Rumsfeld certainly did not conduct his briefing like a Secretary of Defense on the verge of being hounded out of office by an unpopular war.
While Mr. Rumsfeld is known for his aggressive handling of the press, this briefing was unusually "combative," as both the AP and the Washington Post put it, in that Mr. Rumsfeld was unwilling to give the press an inch in terms of the questions that were asked, and directly challenged the falsity of the assumptions that informed them. General Casey and General Pace both questioned the premises of specific questions posed to them on Tuesday; on Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld took this a step further and attacked the slant, if you will, of almost every question asked of him (perhaps the most gentle example is: "The premise of your question is imperfect."). He repeatedly pointed to the agenda of a press the priority of which is to make news in an election cycle--rather than to gather information from the civilian head of the military during wartime. As Mr. Rumsfeld noted, he understands the game and does not blame the press for trying, but he doesn't have to help them or dignify their effort by playing along with them.
A couple of thoughts: contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr. Rumsfeld is not behaving like a SECDEF with one foot out the door. Sally Quinn and her ilk may smugly opine that he will not survive the '06 midterms, but judging from Thursday rather than from the op-ed columns of the Washington Post, this is simply not the case. Ms. Quinn considers his ouster a done deal, but Mr. Rumsfeld seems to have missed her memo. He was aggressive, energetic and far more in command of the material under discussion than the reporters asking the questions. And, I would add, he was eager to engage in this discussion--in a way, he seemed even to enjoy it.
The main thrust of the questions appeared to be to establish that the "benchmarks" for progress being established by the Iraqis and Americans were pointless. That the Iraqis were incapable or unwilling to meet them, and so the idea of creating a strategy to move forward was meaningless. Why wouldn't the Secretary just admit it? Mr. Rumsfeld was having none of this--he pointed out repeatedly that developing such a plan was a process, and a complicated one at that, which incorporates military, political, economic and social issues. While target dates can be useful in this process, they should not be seen as set in stone or the date becomes more important than the actual progress. The press, rather like a dog with a bone, kept arguing the foregone conclusion that the Iraqis would miss these deadlines. In response to the first of eight questions that included the word "benchmark," Mr. Rumsfeld said:
Well, it's a political season, and everyone's trying to make a little mischief out of this and make -- turn it into a political football and see if we can't get it on the front page of every newspaper and find a little daylight between what the Iraqis say or someone in the United States says or somebody else in the United States says.
And I mean, it is not complicated. I've explained it two or three times. The president did an excellent job of explaining it yesterday.
And the situation is this; it is -- it is that the United States, in the persons of our ambassador and the embassy and General Casey and his team, have been, over a period of time, in continuous discussions with the Iraqi government at various levels, and they've been discussing the way forward through the rest of this year and next year. That's a perfectly logical thing for them to do.
As they do that, they then discuss, well, when might something happen? And it isn't a date and it isn't a penalty if it doesn't. I mean, you're trying to add a degree of formality and finality and punishment to something. My goodness.
You could sit down today and take the remaining 16 provinces in the country and say, well, when -- today, when do we -- the U.S. and the Iraqis -- government -- think that this province might move over to the governance of the Iraqis instead of the multinational force? What about this province and that province? And you could lay out and say, well, in this quarter or this two- or three-month period that might -- we might be able to do that, and lay it out. And as I've said before, in some cases you may beat it; you may do it faster than that. In some cases you may do it later than that. In some cases you may do it exactly when you thought and then find it didn't work out, and then you'd have to go back in, take it back, fix it, and then give it back again.
Now, you're looking for some sort of a guillotine to come flowing down if some date isn't met. That is not what this is about. This is complicated stuff. It's difficult. We're looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.
So you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult, that honorable people are working on these things together; there isn't any daylight between them. They will be discussing this and discussing that; they may have a change here or a change there, but it will get worked out. And the value of it, in my view, is that you are, in effect, establishing priorities. You're saying, among the coalition and the Iraqi government, that the goal is to kind of get from where we are to there, and "there" is having the Iraqis govern their country and provide for their own security. And the way to get there is in steps. And we've already passed over two provinces to the Iraqis, and we've already passed over some divisions to the Iraqi military chain of command.
But it's not just security, it is, as I've said, the reconciliation process is going to have three or four major milestones. You can't know when you're going to find agreement with the Sunnis and the Kurds and the Shi'a on some of these complicated things. You can say, "Well, we'd like to try to do it in the first quarter, or the second quarter," and then you can, you know, work hard to try to achieve that, but you may or may not achieve that. This is -- the situation in Iraq is not going to be solved militarily, obviously. It's political, it's economic, and it's security, and all of those have to go forward. And therefore, it makes it that much -- it's multidimensional; it's that much more difficult to predict when any one of those pieces will, in fact, arrive at what today, sitting here in October of 2006, looks like would be desirable or possible.
And so this is something they're going to work through. And I wouldn't waste a lot of newsprint trying to find daylight between everybody on this, or try to find things that are wrong with it. I think -- the idea of saying, "We're here, we want to get there, here are some steps to get there. Let's go ahead and tell the world that we think those are the steps we want to get there, we've kind of agreed on them," and then see if we can't do it. And then, of course, you can point with alarm and say, "Oh my goodness, you didn't make it." And you can have a front-page article and everyone will have a good time. And we'll say, "That's right, you didn't make it." And then the ones that we make earlier than we thought, we'll never see it on the front page.
Out of this 856 word answer, the press seized on this as their money quote:
"So you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult, that honorable people are working on these things together; there isn't any daylight between them."
"Just back off" became the headline, as various articles suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld was issuing a warning declaration to ""anybody demanding deadlines for progress in Iraq" (again, the AP). Such a headline makes Mr. Rumsfeld sound defensive and dismissive, not to mention at a loss for an actual policy, and so fits the image of stubborn refusal to face the truth and failure of duty that is being fostered by the press. Of course, Mr. Rumsfeld was doing no such thing--he was talking directly to the press and referring to the types of questions they were asking in an attempt to get him to somehow make the news they want. Of course, if the press would like to define itself as war critics that would be a refreshing note of honesty in this process, but as a whole, the Pentagon corps has shied away from such self-revelation and instead makes Mr. Rumsfeld into the dictatorial bad guy who is unwilling to even hear any criticism of his efforts.
Mb>The concluding exchange between Mr.Rumsfeld and NBC's Jim Miklaszewski was perhaps the most dramatic example of the Secretary attempting to help the press see the error of its ways:
Q But given the record, Mr. Secretary, can you blame us for the tone, expressing some skepticism? Because --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, no. That's your job. You can express all the skepticism you want.
Q Every time a benchmark has been laid down in terms of security forces, and the like, the Iraqis have been unable to meet them.
SEC. RUMSFELD: That is just false.
Q And you have no --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Just a minute. Just a minute!
That is false!
Q That is not false.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Every time a security benchmark has been laid down the Iraqis have failed to meet it? Wrong! Just isn't true. And it would be a shame if people walked out thinking it.
Just a minute! Just a minute!
Q Okay.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Now, why do I say it's wrong? Well, first of all, it has the benefit of being true that it's wrong. The Iraqi security force training program that we have laid out has been proceeding in an orderly, reasonable way. We have projections that we release to the Congress every month or two or three; we show them what we think we're going to have by way of training and equipping. We show them that the chain of command's been set up. We've shown them when the new divisions get shopped over -- Iraqi divisions -- to the chain of command because they have the capability of handling it. We've done it -- two of them now. There will be more coming along. We can't say precisely what day that will happen. But it's all laid out there. We think it's working. They're doing a good job. When we said that they would handle the bulk of the security for the last election, they did. We were in an outer cordon, they were handling it in the inner cordon. They did a good job. The election took place.
I mean, to say that every security -- I mean, that's -- there's people ranting like that up on the Hill, but that is just wrong to say that! It's not even -- it isn't even close to being true!
Q They have met the benchmarks in numbers, but not the ability to stand up and take control. It was evidenced here. General Casey said as much in the fight to retake Baghdad, that when the U.S. military called on the Iraqi military to provide forces to assist in that operation, they provided only a small fraction of what is needed.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Okay. Look at it this way. Have there been instances, many instances, when the Iraqi security forces have been able to do precisely what was intended and what was predicted? Answer: Yes. Have there been instances where they were not able to do what was predicted and hoped for or intended? Answer: Yes.
That means your question, your statement, your assertion is flat wrong. You said "every" security benchmark has been missed. That's not true! They've done a darn good job.
Q Perhaps the assertion was too precise --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Too precise? It was inaccurate.
Q But in terms of their ability --
SEC. RUMSFELD: You might want to retract it. Just for the fun of it, just retract it.
Q (Laughs.)
Q In terms of their ability to provide for their own security, there are many times when the U.S. has called upon them where they just haven't stood up. Is --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second; there are many times. There are some times. There are some times where they took over something, it didn't work, and people had to go back in and help them, no question, and take it back. I've said that from the beginning. That's part of this process.
It is not a smooth road. It's a bumpy road. We know that. We've said it repeatedly. There's no surprise to it. But anyone who runs around denigrating the Iraqi security forces and minimizing their capability is making a mistake and doesn't understand the situation.
I think it's worth noting that the senior Pentagon correspondent from NBC news asked the Secretary of Defense a question so fundamentally incorrect that it elicited this kind of a response. The unfortunate Mr. Miklaszewski might have protested that his premise was "too precise," but that's almost pathetically false as well since it is obvious that rather than being too precise, he was being far too broad in his assertion that the ISF have missed benchmarks "every time" they have been laid down. As Mr. Rumsfeld pointed out, that's not "too precise." It's simply "inaccurate," and factually unsound. Furthermore, it seems to me that Mr. Miklaszewski knows this perfectly well. The substance of Mr. Rumsfeld's response could not have come as a surprise to him. Did he simply mis-speak? If so, why did try to argue the point; why didn't he quickly agree and rephrase? Why didn't he ever actually retract?
Such questions become increasingly uncomfortable in terms of how the press is reporting this war. It is certainly no crime to challenge and engage Mr. Rumsfeld on these issues--after all, that's why he had the briefing, and he doesn't appear to mind tough questions as long as they have a basis in reality. That Mr. Miklaszewski would ask a question that's demonstrably "flat wrong" suggests a degree of arrogance and a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts that puts the supposedly imperial and untruthful Bush administration to shame. To his credit, Mr. Miklaszewski admitted on the Today show Friday morning that "strictly by the numbers," Mr. Rumsfeld is "correct" about the status of the ISF, but he insisted on the underlying premise of his question even though his facts are inaccurate. I suppose in his universe, Mr. Rumsfeld should have dutifully given the answer Mr. Miklaszewski wanted to the question he should have asked rather than the one he actually did, but from where I sit, we're better off listening to the person who is actually "correct," albeit "strictly by the numbers."
It is unfortunate that such "reporters" are serving as the conduit for information on this conflict to the public, but at least with the transcripts and video clips readily available, said public can start to compare what actually happens at these briefings with press reports and draw their own conclusions about this war and the people running it. |
