WASHINGTON, 26 August 2004 — US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership of the Pentagon has been weighed by a jury of his peers and found somewhat wanting.
A report by a blue-ribbon panel he appointed to review the military establishment’s role in creating and handling detainee abuse problems at Abu Ghraib prison said that the Iraq War plan he played a key role in shaping helped create the conditions that led to the scandal.
In addition, the four-member panel, which was led by one former defense secretary, James Schlesinger, and included another, Harold Brown, found that Rumsfeld’s slow response when the Iraqi insurgency flared last summer worsened the situation.
The panel’s findings provide new support for two central criticisms of the Rumsfeld team’s approach in Iraq last year: That the invasion plan called for too few troops, half as many as were used in the 1991 Gulf War. And that the Pentagon failed to plan smartly for occupying the country after the United States defeated the Iraqi military.
One of the major factors leading to the detainee abuse, Brown said Tuesday, was “the expectation by the Defense Department leadership, along with most of the rest of the administration, that following the collapse of the Iraqi regime through coalition military operations, there would be a stable successor regime that would soon emerge in Iraq.’’
As Schlesinger, the panel’s chairman, tartly put it, the leaders of the military establishment “did look at history books. Unfortunately, it was the wrong history.’’ He said they tended to focus on the refugee problems that followed the 1991 war, rather, he implied, than on other conflicts in which internal turmoil has followed an invasion.
In delivering its mixed verdict, the Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld’s handling of the scandal once it broke. “If there’s something to be commended on this whole operation, it’s the way the secretary of defense has approached the investigations,’’ said retired Air Force Gen. Charles A. Horner, the third member of the panel.
“I think that overall, Secretary Rumsfeld has handled this extremely well,’’ Brown added. “If the head of a department had to resign every time anyone down below did something wrong, it would be a very empty Cabinet table.’’ Indeed, while some members of Congress criticized Rumsfeld Tuesday, there were no calls for him to step down. The harshest statement came from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who said, “Secretary Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon bear significant responsibility for the fundamental failures that led to the torture and other abuses at Abu Ghraib. At a minimum, there was gross negligence at the highest levels in the Pentagon.’’
The report showed Rumsfeld’s top uniformed brass did not help him out much in rapidly pivoting from the peacekeeping they expected to be conducting to fighting the guerrilla war that confronted them.
The panel repeatedly faulted the judgments and actions of the entire chain of senior generals involved — Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who for most of the time was the top US commander on the ground in Iraq; his two bosses, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who stepped down as chief of the US Central Command last summer as the insurgency was breaking out; Franks’ successor, Army Gen. John Abizaid; and Myers, the nation’s top military officer.
“It would have been better had greater supervision been exercised ... (and) there is failure at the senior levels of the Pentagon to exercise that supervision,’’ Schlesinger said. “I think that more of that falls upon the ... uniformed military than on the Office of the Secretary of Defense.’’
The report struck a tone of dismay in analyzing the sluggish response of the military bureaucracy to events in Iraq last summer and fall. It noted, for example, that a personnel plan for Sanchez’s headquarters “was not finally approved until December 2003, six months into the insurgency.’’ The result, the report concludes, was that Sanchez and his undermanned staff were overwhelmed and unable to take needed actions. In addition, the report blames Sanchez for setting up a confused chain of command that made it difficult to determine the responsibilities of certain commanders.
The pervasive lack of troops, especially those with specialized skills, had a cascading effect that helped lead to the abuses, the report said. As the insurgency took off, front-line army units, lacking interpreters, took to rounding up “any and all suspicious-looking persons — all too often including women and children,’’ it said. This indiscriminate approach resulted in a “flood’’ of detainees at Abu Ghraib that inundated demoralized and fatigued interrogators, it continued.
When asked whether anyone should resign over those findings, the panel members tended to sidestep the question, saying they were more interested in preventing the abuses from recurring than in fixing blame.
