Strategic decision
Growing sentiment in the Army: Support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld.
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By Sidney Blumenthal
salon.com
May 13, 2004 | Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Bush in February of torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. From the dearth of detail Rumsfeld has recalled of that meeting one can deduce that Bush gave no orders, insisted on no responsibility, asked not to see the already commissioned Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention them. If he received orders from the commander in chief, he neglected to implement them. One must presume Bush gave none. He acted as he did when he received the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" -- complacent and passive. Bush had asserted that the PDB required no action because it did not include exact times and places of attack; in the Taguba report, however, word about torture was highly specific.
The threat as Rumsfeld perceived it from the beginning was the news of torture itself. Suppressing it broadened into a defense at all costs of his position. For decades, Rumsfeld has gained a reputation, swimming in the bureaucratic seas, as a "great white shark" -- sleek, fast moving and voracious. As counselor to President Nixon during his impeachment crisis, his deputy was young Dick Cheney, who learned at his knee. Together they helped right the ship of state under President Ford, where they got a misleading gloss as moderates. Sheer competence at handling power was confused with pragmatism. Cheney became the most hard-line of congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that he was always more conservative than they may ever have imagined. One of the lessons the two appear to have learned from the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy. One gets the impression that they, unlike Nixon, would have burned the incriminating White House tapes.
Under President Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs of government, and staffed themselves with, members of the neoconservative cabal, infusing their right-wing temperaments with ideological imperatives. The unvarnished will to power was covered with the veneer of ideas and idealism. Invading Iraq was not a case of vengeance or mere power -- it was Rumsfeld, after all, who had traveled to Baghdad to lend U.S. support to Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran and help provide him with weapons of mass destruction -- but the cause of democracy and human rights.
On Rumsfeld's survival depends the fate of the neoconservative project. If he were to go, so would his deputy, the neoconservative Robespierre Paul Wolfowitz, and below him the cadres who stovepiped the disinformation that Iraqi exile and neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate public opinion before the war. It was Rumsfeld who argued immediately after Sept. 11 that Afghanistan was a steppingstone to Iraq, inserted his reliable man to write the National Intelligence Estimate that claimed WMD as the rationale for the war (suppressing contrary evidence) and dismissed Colin Powell's State Department's warnings about violent insurgency in the postwar period.
In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld explained that the government asking the press not to report news of Abu Ghraib "is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news." War is peace. |
