Three Cheers for Rumsfeld
By Diplomad
From the Vice Chief Diplomad for Defense Affairs:
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is everyone's favorite bogeyman for the Bush Administration. Even some Republican Senators have joined the "usual suspects" critics from the left in the United States and America's critics around the world. But President Bush backed the SecDef and reconfirmed that he's staying on indefinitely in the Administration.
This is good news. Diplomads are big fans of Donald Rumsfeld, and in this respect are probably a minority in the State Department bureaucracy. Reading the NY Times or Washington Post you would get the sense that Rumsfeld was Secretary Powell's arch-enemy, and that foreign policy was not working properly if the two of them were arguing or if, God help us, the President was listening to Rumsfeld and not to Powell. Here's what's wrong with that kind of analysis:
-- The President makes the final call if SecDef and SecState disagree or even they agree. If you don't like the outcome, blame the President. But whoops, it turns out there are not enough voting-age blamers to go around and President Bush just got re-elected, decisively.
-- Secretaries of State and Defense SHOULD disagree. It goes with the territory and is a healthy part of making good decisions. The military view of the world sees areas of responsibility, unified commands and missions; the diplomatic view sees geographic regions and use of force as an element of overall foreign policy. Each has a different constituency of troops or employees and interests both at home and overseas. Diplomads who work a lot with our military counterparts find that we have healthy disagreements all the time. It's not a problem.
-- Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld each worked in the other's bureaucracy (the former in a distinguished military career that took him to the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs, the latter as Ambassador to NATO); it's not hard to envision them having been named to the other one's position.
-- If they come across to foreign audiences as a good cop/bad cop pair, that doesn't mean they're not working towards the same objectives.
Conclusion: It doesn't bother us at all that our boss, whom we respect, had disagreements with the Secretary of Defense, whom we also respect. But that is only debunking a negative argument. On the purely positive side, we believe Donald Rumsfeld has been one of the most successful Secretaries of Defense in modern times, and under some of the most challenging circumstances. During his tenure the US military has modernized and begun the long transformation into a leaner, meaner fighting machine. We are repositioning our forces away from the Cold-War-era front lines and making them more mobile. Gone is the Clinton-Gore Administration view that we had reached an end-of-ideology period where the military is only to be deployed for peacekeeping or strining elecrical wires in Haiti -- in other words, the US Army as the Salvation Army. Under Rumsfeld's leadership our military is fighting successfully the wars of the 21st century and preparing for future ones.
The war in Afghanistan was, by anyone's estimate, a tremendous success. Nobody believed it possible, and to this day you rarely see credit given Rumsfeld for his part in it. You rarely even see much credit to the overall outcome as an example of implanting a democracy (by force), with local characteristics, in a part of the world that supposedly is incapable of handling democracy.
The conventional part of the war in Iraq was also a tremendous success. Again, nobody predicted that Saddam's army could be defeated and Baghdad occupied as fast as it was and with a relatively small number of casualties. Leaving aside one's views on the war itself (note: Diplomads are still for it), the military campaign was brilliant. And the fact that a few works of art got looted from museums later didn't really detract from the brilliance.
Presently we are faced with an insurgency in Iraq that is nastier than we thought it would be. In this context, and because of the Abu Ghraib business, people want to get rid of Secretary Rumsfeld. Maybe Rumsfeld, like a lot of others, underestimated the insurgency last year. He certainly doesn't underestimate it now. Ask the people of Fallujah if you're not clear on this last point. To the extent that the insurgency is still tough to defeat, there are a lot of productive ways to deal with it that have nothing to do with blaming Secretary Rumsfeld: Train Iraq troops, work with neighboring countries, go forward with the elections. These are all part of a strategy that makes sense and requires strong political will. Prosecuting the soldiers who abused the Iraq prisoners also requires strong political will. But let's not forget that the insurgents and most of the prisoners are the bad guys; Rumsfeld is a good guy.
Other criticisms of the SecDef are really small potatoes: he didn't use pen and ink to sign letters to fallen soldiers' families, and he's blamed for there not being enough armored vehicles in Iraq (blamed by the same people who vote against increases in our defense budget, mind you), and he pissed off some French and Germans by saying they were "old Europe." (Note: they are.)
We have to get to a bottom line before we lose too many readers. So here it is: SecDef is a great American. He's come back to government as Secretary of Defense a full generation after he last held that position (1975-77) not because he's ambitious, but because he wanted to accomplish what was necessary to defend America in the 21st Century. Think of your own career, and how from one job to the next you might feel slighted if you get a lateral transfer and don't move up a notch in the pecking order. Could you imagine yourself returning to the same assignment 25 years later wanting to do a better job? And taking a whopping pay cut in the process? |
