The continuing argument over whether Donald Rumsfeld should be fired from his job as US secretary of defense is all about whether he has fulfilled his duties correctly. According to six retired US generals, he hasn’t; they say that in 2003, he threw away years of military planning and ignored military advice whenever it did not happen to coincide with his own political agenda. According to President Bush, who broke off his Easter holiday at the Camp David retreat to say so, Rumsfeld is doing a fine job at a challenging point in America’s history.
Any debate is, however, meaningless unless the facts on the ground in Iraq are taken into account. Despite the best efforts by the White House spin doctors and despite the strenuous efforts of men of good will from both Iraq and the coalition forces, Iraq is in turmoil. Voters may have chosen a constitutional assembly, a constitution and a new Parliament but there is little more in the way of achievement to which Bush can point. Few doubt that Washington’s No. 1 priority in Iraq is how to find a sufficiently face-saving excuse as soon as possible, cut its losses and leave.
It may be that the White House only ever had one other clear policy aim in Iraq, and that was ousting Saddam Hussein. Between the achievement of these two policies has come a fog of confusion, misjudgment and ineptitude, from which at no point emerged an informed understanding of how the best interests of Iraqis could be served. The longer Washington fumbled the challenge, the stronger became the forces of violence that have brought Iraq to the brink of chaos. From the beginning, the succession of calamities has taken place on Donald Rumsfeld’s watch. The buck may stop with his president, but the defense secretary and his fellow arch neoconservative, Vice President Dick Cheney, have led the argument that international terror was being dealt a crucial blow by the invasion of Iraq. The exact opposite has proved to be the case — just as every single piece of WMD evidence used to justify the invasion has turned out to be false.
Top brass in the military never like to be associated with failure and defeat. This must be borne in mind when assessing the trenchant criticism of Rumsfeld by the retired generals. Why, it should be asked, did they not say or do something at the time if they believed their boss was so wrong? Perhaps they did. In which case any documentary evidence that Rumsfeld overrode all expert military advice contrary to his agenda should be made public.
The most important people in all this are of course the Iraqis themselves. Would Rumsfeld’s fall from power affect, by even one iota, the nightmare into which their country has been plunged? Would the withdrawal tomorrow of every single soldier and the destruction of every political aim which Rumsfeld has sought ease their terrible plight? The answer has to be no. The secretary of defense seems doomed to sink with his purblind policies. Tragically he will take millions of Iraqis with him; even more tragically it is they who have to live with the outcome of his overweening pride and arrogance.
