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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
Architect of a Disaster
The
Fall of Donald Rumsfeld
By ELIZABETH SCHULTE
HE WAS the architect of the war in Iraq,
and like a condemned building, it all came tumbling down around
Donald Rumsfeld's ears last week.
In the aftermath of the Republicans'
crushing defeat in congressional elections, with voters in large
part registering their protest of the Bush administration's war
on Iraq, somebody's head had to roll.
And it couldn't have happened
to a nicer guy. The resignation of Rumsfeld the day after the
election, argued the Wall Street Journal, "opens
the door for the biggest change of U.S. policy in Iraq"
in three years.
Rumsfeld epitomizes the arrogance
and brutality of the Bush administration. When the ordinarily
compliant media began airing criticism of the administration's
policy in Iraq this summer, Rumsfeld accused them of appeasing
"a new type of fascism" that he likened to Adolph Hitler's
Nazis.
This from the man who crafted
a U.S. defense policy that is guilty of any number of war crimes--from
the "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq to the torture,
abuse and humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo
Bay. In fact, a German prosecutor recently announced plans to
seek a trial of Rumsfeld for his role in the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal.
As a Pentagon consultant told
the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld may not be personally
culpable, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances.
The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how
we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends
justify the means."
By the time of Rumsfeld's resignation,
his opponents were too many to mention. They included not just
Democratic Party politicians but Republicans, too--among them,
military brass and former Pentagon advisors, some of whom make
up the old guard that served under Bush's father.
On November 4, a few days before
the election, the Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times
and Marine Corps Times all ran an editorial simply
titled "Time for Rumsfeld to go."
Still, the resignation came
as a surprise, since Bush had insisted he would stand by Rumsfeld.
* *
*
WHEN RUMSFELD cleans out his
desk, he'll be taking with him not just warm memories of his
service to the Bush administration, but a long legacy in previous
administrations.
In 1971, Rumsfeld--a four-term
congressman representing the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago--got
a job as special adviser to President Richard Nixon. He was appointed
NATO ambassador in 1972, after Nixon's re-election, and began
advocating a more hawkish approach to foreign policy.
A survivor of the Watergate
scandal, Rumsfeld became chief of staff to Gerald Ford, where
he hired a former colleague, Dick Cheney. Appointed defense secretary
in 1975, Rumsfeld worked to strengthen the Pentagon and re-establish
the military power the U.S. military lost as a result of its
defeat in Vietnam.
In between government jobs,
Rumsfeld was a natural in the dog-eat-dog business world. He
became the CEO at the drug giant Searle and scored big profits
for the company--and a small fortune for himself--through brutal
job cuts.
Meanwhile, as Ronald Reagan's
Middle East envoy, Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein to offer
intelligence and other aid for Iraq to win its war with Iran.
In 1987, Rumsfeld headed a
commission--along with Paul Wolfowitz--to investigate the supposed
ballistic missile threat to the U.S. The Rumsfeld Commission's
report a year later warned that the potential danger to the U.S.
was greater than intelligence agencies had believed, with the
gravest threat coming from--sound familiar?--Iraq, Iran and North
Korea.
Rumsfeld helped develop and
implement a new strategy for U.S. imperialism in the 1990s, as
one of the founders of the right-wing think tank, the Project
for a New American Century (PNAC), along with Wolfowitz and the
Reagan administration's Richard Perle.
PNAC's aim was to put forward
a more aggressive foreign policy doctrine, in which the U.S.
would finally overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" by being
unafraid to conduct "pre-emptive war" against so-called
rogue states like Iraq. Under the strategy, the U.S. would no
longer be afraid to "go it alone," without the partnership
of other nations or international bodies like the United Nations.
In 1998, the group wrote an
open letter--signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, the conservative
Weekly Standard's William Kristol and John Bolton--to
Clinton, arguing, "We urge you to seize that opportunity,
and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests
of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That
strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's
regime from power."
Rumsfeld was successful, at
least in part. That year, Clinton signed the "Iraq Liberation
Act," which paved the way for regime change five years later
during the first Bush administration.
* *
*
THE HAWKS in the Bush administration
had been trying to cook up a pretext for war on Iraq since they
came to office. The September 11 attacks provided it.
For Rumsfeld and his friends
in PNAC, the 2001 terrorist attacks were viewed as an "opportunity"
to project U.S. imperialism anywhere in the world in the name
of the "war on terror." After what seemed at the time
like a quick and decisive victory in Afghanistan, the hawks could
hardly wait to move their "war on terror" to their
long-awaited target.
As columnist Charles Krauthammer
wrote in November 2001, "The elementary truth that seems
to elude the experts again and again--Gulf War, Afghan war, next
war--is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything,
psychology above all. The psychology in the region is now one
of fear and deep respect for American power...
"Now is the time to go
for the low-hanging fruit: giving the Philippines assistance
in crushing their own al-Qaeda guerrillas. Telling the thugs
running Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen to cease and desist, to
shut down the training camps, to cough up the terrorists--'or
else,' as the president so delicately puts it. And then on to
Iraq."
For its vast untapped oil resources
and strategic importance in the Middle East, Iraq was an important
stop for Bush's war on terror.
As journalist Patrick Cockburn
writes in The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, "The
debate on why the U.S. invaded Iraq has been over-sophisticated.
The main motive for going to war was that the White House thought
it could win such a conflict very easily and to its own great
advantage. They were heady times in Washington in 2002, as the
final decisions were being taken to invade Iraq. It was the high
tide of imperial self-confidence."
The administration was willing
to use any story to justify the invasion--like Saddam Hussein's
non-existent ties to al-Qaeda, or the Iraqi government's phantom
weapons of mass destruction. When the administration decided
it wasn't getting a good enough story from its spy agencies,
Rumsfeld formed a new Pentagon Office of Special Plans to "shape"
the intelligence.
Rumsfeld's strategy for Iraq
envisioned a quick and decisive war. The U.S. would use its overwhelming
firepower to create "shock and awe," allowing a relatively
small force on the ground to seize control. Iraqi citizens, starving
for democracy, would hail U.S. soldiers as liberators.
That, as we know, proved to
be fantasy.
Rumsfeld's lean-and-mean approach
sparked disagreement and anger among some generals and other
higher-ups in the U.S. military, because he downgraded the importance
of the number of troops and supplies. When resistance to U.S.
forces developed in the wake of the seemingly quick conquest
of Iraq, the Rumsfeld strategy was proved wanting. A growing
number of generals began speaking out.
As usual, Rumsfeld tried to
bluster through on the strength of arrogance alone. In 2004,
when a soldier asked the defense secretary during a stop at Camp
Buehring in the Kuwait desert why the troops had to fortify their
vehicles with scrap metal, Rumsfeld replied, "As you know,
you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you
want." He added, "You can have all the armor in the
world on a tank, and it can [still] be blown up."
* *
*
U.S. SOLDIERS are paying a
heavy toll for the Rumsfeld doctrine in Iraq.
The human cost for the people
of Iraq is far greater--as they suffer the ravages of war and
occupation, starvation and poverty, and an infrastructure that
remains worse today than under Saddam Hussein. According to Cockburn,
"Before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, 50 percent of Iraqis
had access to drinkable water, but this figure had dropped to
32 percent by the end of 2005."
The avalanche of opposition
to Bush's war in Iraq shown at polls put pressure on him to got
rid of his right-hand man in Iraq. But what the future holds
is far from certain.
In December, a White House
commission led by senior Republicans James Baker and Lee Hamilton
is scheduled to release its finding and present recommendations
for a "new course" in Iraq. A member of that commission,
Robert Gates--another senior Republican and veteran of past administration--has
been nominated to replace Rumsfeld.
These people may talk about
a "changed" strategy, but they won't give up Iraq.
"I don't think Gates means the president is looking for
a way out of Iraq," William Kristol told the New York
Times. "Gates means he knew he had to make a change
and get a fresh face in to build public support. So long as Bush
is president, he's not going to want to withdraw from Iraq, and
he's not going to want to go back to a pre-9/11 foreign policy,
and that's really the core of it."
Gates' methods may be different,
but the goals will remain the same. And so far, the solutions
being offered by Democrats are a far cry from what's needed to
end the Iraq disaster--immediate withdrawal.
Antiwar activists need to seize
the opportunity that has opened up with the Bush administration
back on its heels--and build the grassroots opposition that calls
for immediate withdrawal.
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