Much Ado About Rummy

It’s clear that Donald Rumsfeld needs to be replaced as Secretary of Defense. Nonetheless, I find his critics just as annoying as I find him.

As many have pointed out recently, the retired generals calling for his head have little credibility. Even though we live in a bizarre age in which civilian Pentagon leaders are more hawkish and even nuttier than the generals, civilians still control the military. This is the law of the land, and rightfully so. Generals therefore serve at the will of civilians and have no say over who their civilian bosses are. Moreover, if the generals really wanted to change the policies, they should have pushed for change while they were still serving. True, they probably would have been punished for speaking out, but if they really feel the way they do, they should have put their country before their jobs.

Even more frustrating than the retired generals are the war hawk pundits who are out to cover their own asses by pretending that Rumsfeld messed the war up, as though the whole thing wasn’t inherently messy. The war these pundits support is a fictional one in which nothing goes wrong. The fact that things did not go as well as planned reflects more on the nature of war as an ugly, uncontrollable beast and less on the planners of the war themselves. Yes, Rumsfeld and Co. made errors in carrying out the war, but no one could have won this war. In case no one remembers Vietnam, one of the lessons of it was that you can’t defeat a million angry peasants with small arms. It doesn’t matter how technologically advanced your army is if you are trying to illegally occupy a hostile land.

A perfect example of this kind of silly “The war was brilliant in my head but Rumsfeld botched it” argument comes from the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, whose support for the war has been unwavering from the start. In an op-ed called “Replace Rumsfeld,” Ignatius rehashes typical criticisms of Rumsfeld’s war planning – that we didn’t have enough troops and that we shouldn’t have disbanded Saddam’s army.

Ignatius is right in that Rumsfeld’s strategy of a light force did not work. But would more troops have made a difference? I think the answer is clearly no. Escalation did not work in Vietnam, and it wouldn’t have worked in Iraq. Again, it doesn’t matter how big and mighty your force is if the locals don’t want you there. More troops would just mean more targets for insurgents and more difficulty in eventually pulling them out.

Ignatius is also right that disbanding the Iraqi army angered Sunnis and left a lot of ex-soldiers angry and vulnerable for recruitment by insurgents. But c’mon, let’s have a little historical perspective. When we invaded in 2003, we were much more worried about inflaming the Shi’ites, and rightly so. They are the larger religious sect and are a potent and well-organized force, one that will clearly dictate the future of Iraq. Saddam’s army had been brutalizing the Shi’ites for years, and by leaving it intact we would have set off an immediate Shi’ite insurgency. We would also have lost all credibility in our de-Ba’athification campaign, because how can you try to hold the old regime to account when you’ve re-hired all their old generals and head torturers?

Finally, as though he was just relishing for a chance to prove his own incompetence, Ignatius concludes by suggesting that Joe Lieberman would make a good replacement for Rumsfeld. The apparent reasoning is that Rumsfeld’s act can only be followed by the one man in the country more out of touch on the war than Rumsfeld himself.

Make no mistake – Iraq was a failed war from the beginning, and changing tactics would have just led to different kinds of failures. It doesn’t matter how much hawkish pundits complain; their support for the war led us to where we are. And it doesn’t matter what retired generals have to say, either, because they don’t control the military, and they passed their chance to try to change its direction.

Furthermore, the criticism of Rumsfeld for his war planning grossly overlooks his real crime, the normalization of abuse and torture. In just five years, he turned the US into a torture empire, one with a human rights record rivaling third-world dictatorships.

Stepping down as Defense Secretary is just the first step. Rumsfeld needs to stand before The Hague and face trial for overseeing the creation of a network of prisons where evidence, charges, trials and lawyers have been replaced with torture. Rumsfeld deserves the kind of just legal proceeding that he would not grant his prisoners all over world.