Rumsfeld round-up

Where have Donald Rumsfeld's friends gone? I've scoured the net and the media for full-blooded supporters of the former Defence Secretary and, well, guess what? I couldn't find anyone serious marshalling a defence of him.

Here's a quick digest of what the commentariat had to say. Let's start with Gerard Baker, the US Editor of The Times, whose opinion of Mr Rumsfeld was warmer than many others. Rummy was the right man but for the wrong times:

The likely epitaph on Mr Rumsfeld’s career is that he was precisely the wrong kind of man for his times. His brusque, managerial style — he has been know to humiliate senior military officials in front of their peers — reflected a confident belief in the cleansing power of creative destruction. He had made his career destabilising conservative, slow-moving institutions and intended to do the same to the US military. But while that approach may have been appropriate in a time of peace it was ill-suited to a time of war, when instability leads to chaos and weakness.

Ah, the military. Here's what David Ignatius of The Washington Post had to say of the man who "came to symbolise not simply the failure of the Iraq war but also the arrogance and lack of accountability":

Senior military officers referred to it as "the 7,000-mile screwdriver." That was their way of describing Donald Rumsfeld's penchant for micromanaging aspects of the Iraq war that interested him. And it's one reason the military has to be happy that Rumsfeld is leaving - even happier, maybe, than Democrats, who have claimed an early scalp for their election victory.

and he writes this in his mitigation:

Rumsfeld's gift was his brilliance and intellectual toughness. He kept his head up even as the war in Iraq went from bad to awful. In that, he was a harder man even than one of his predecessors, Robert McNamara, who in his final year running the Vietnam War began to crack privately under the pressure. Rumsfeld embodied an old injunction: Never let them see you sweat.

But that intellectual toughness and hardness of character, according to a New York Times leader, made him unwilling to listen to the military about the reality of the dire situation in Iraq. Leaving this problem for his successor:

The challenge for Mr. Rumsfeld’s chosen successor, Robert Gates, who was a Deputy National Security Adviser to Mr. Bush’s father and then served as Director of Central Intelligence, will be to bring home to the president how desperate the situation has become in Iraq and to see that the war’s conduct from here on is dictated by reality, not ideology.

That would be a truly revolutionary departure from the current era, when a succession of dubious Rumsfeld doctrines failed the reality test yet remained official policy.

Mr. Rumsfeld, you remember, was absolutely certain that Iraq could be transformed with less than half the troops that a generation of senior generals had thought necessary. He was wrong, but it was the Army’s top general who lost his job. Similar travesties played out over postwar planning and over reconstruction contracts. At some point, people must have stopped telling Mr. Rumsfeld what was really going on, fearing his wrath or retaliation.

Mr. Gates’s most urgent task, assuming he is confirmed, must be to reopen those necessary channels of communication with military, intelligence and foreign service professionals on the ground. After hearing what they have to say, he needs to recommend a realistic new strategy to Mr. Bush in place of the one that is now demonstrably failing.

The Los Angeles Times, agreeing, had this to say:

Better late than never. More than two years after Secretary of Defence Donald H. Rumsfeld offered to resign in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, President Bush finally agreed to let Rumsfeld go, to make room for a "fresh perspective." It's an easy gesture at this point — the political equivalent of bringing down the piñata once it's been battered beyond recognition.

But he confused he need to modernize weapons systems and create a more nimble military with a license to wage war on the cheap, famously dismissing advice that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq. The occupation was ill-planned because of a reliance on the assumptions of overzealous neocon thinkers.

Well, that was the temperate criticism. Now for the rougher stuff. Andrew Sullivan, from the moderate Right, did not mince his words:

He remains one of the most incompetent defence secretaries in history (McNamara looks good in comparison). But he is also a war criminal: a torturer who broke the laws of this country.

But the Left, while glad to see the back of Mr Rumsfeld, just saw him as an easy target. RJ Eskow of the Huffington Post had this to say:

Well, Rumsfeld's out, and voters aren't dancing in the streets. Why should they? They didn't vote for better execution of the war effort. They voted for a change in policy, and a timely withdrawal:

The Republicans have called the "centrist" bluff by getting rid of Rumsfeld. He was, admittedly, lousy at his job. He thoughtfully went out with a final fusillade of condescending and self-serving horse manure, just to remind us how hapless he truly has been. America's generals will certainly not miss him. But voters have rejected the war, not the middle management responsible for its execution.

Wait a moment. Is that Mark Steyn, the self-described "one-man global content provider" and the rollicking right-wing pundit saying something nice about Mr Rumsfeld? Oh yes, but being a fine lunch partner isn't much of a defence.

I was sorry to see that the first casualty of the 2006 election was the Defense Secretary. I had lunch with him a week or so back and he was in fine form, if clearly frustrated. To fire him mere hours after the polls closed makes the President look small.

So pretty much all of punditland are glad to see the back of Mr Rumsfeld. So is there a respectable case to be made for him and his prosecution of the war? Does anyone dare buck the consensus?

Robbie Millen

Comments

[ray jones]

getting political agreement as regards iraq is only half what one needs, if one gets religeous unity of all the churches. moses is beleived by the big three, so go to the big three jews christians and muslims and get the genuin religous leaders to sign a no kill agreement, those who will not sign should be seen as non religeous using religeon as a cover. the war is faught by politics, this agreement does not stop the war, but it officialy refuses to recognise the terrorist, taking away their cover, and leaving them what they are terrorist. no religous cover.muslims are saying true islam is peacefull. let them prove by signing.

[Mandarin Orange]

Days and days have gone by now and there still hasn't been so much as a squeak of support from anyone, not even Stephen Pollard, who once claimed "Rummy" as his political hero:

http://www.stephenpollard.net/000765.html