Rumsfeld’s fatal flaws coming home to roost

THIRTY-THREE years ago, Donald Rumsfeld, then a domestic policy official in the Nixon administration, became involved in foreign policy by volunteering to run the post Vietnam War reconstruction effort.

History is not without its little ironies.

Now Secretary of Defence, Rumsfeld is under assault from the left and right and may find his long career prematurely ended because of his insufficient interest in the reconstruction effort in Iraq.

What is notable about the past few weeks is the exposure of fault-lines within the Republican Party on the inextricably linked issues of the Iraq War and Rumsfeld’s performance as Secretary of Defence. President George W Bush may support Rumsfeld but this obscures a complicated picture. Abu Ghraib may be the trigger but the concern goes deeper to Rumsfeld’s management style, failure to anticipate resistance in post war Iraq, failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and above all his apparent determination to do everything “on the cheap” with insufficient troops.

According to the columnist and leading conservative Bob Novak, ordinary Republicans “are distraught about the US adventure in Iraq. They ask questions. Who is responsible for the false forecast of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that was the immediate cause for war? Are we really intent on planting democracy throughout the Arab world? These skeptics are not about to vote for John Kerry for president, but they are very unhappy”.

Novak later wrote, “the clear consensus (of Republicans) was that Rumsfeld had to go”.

George Will, another conservative, was also scathing saying that “this administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts”.

The message is simple: what’s happening is not working; it’s not changing either and it should.

Even neo-conservatives, the intellectual architects of the war, have turned on Rumsfeld, who they once idolised. Their beef is more personal.

Rumsfeld’s incompetence has upset their plan to bring democracy to the Middle East. Writing in Washington’s leading neo-conservative magazine “The Weekly Standard” Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol said that: “Rumsfeld famously talks about preparing for the ‘unknown unknowns’. Yet the crisis was hardly unforeseeable. He failed to put in place in Iraq a force big enough to handle the challenges. That is a significant failure, and we do not yet know the price that will be paid for it.”

Even before Abu Ghraib they wanted Rumsfeld out.

Now, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib Rumsfeld does not have many friends.

He may have equipped himself well in front of Congress, and Republicans may believe the abuses were the work of rogue soldiers but they still ask why there were only 450 untrained reservists to guard 7,000 prisoners. How could the US be so unprepared?

This gets to a criticism commonly directed at Rumsfeld: he is stubborn, refuses to countenance information that goes against what he wants to hear, and will not change his policy as circumstances change.

Even as evidence mounted that he might be wrong he failed to change course, describing looting and disorder in the war’s aftermath as normal with the phrase “freedom’s untidy”.

This kill the messenger way of operating appears to have destroyed the ability of the policy process to adapt to change on the ground.

However, these flaws have not always been flaws. Rumsfeld was thought to be close to being fired in the weeks up to September 11, 2001. In his eight months as Secretary of Defence in the Bush administration, he had launched a bureaucratic war with all four services of the uniformed military, the US Congress, and the State Department. His time seemed to be limited. The changed landscape following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington played to his strengths and probably saved his job.

During the Afghanistan war, his abrupt manner and no nonsense attitude won him many admirers.

One can trace Rumsfeld’s destructive tendencies back further to his first stint as Defence Secretary in the Ford administration. Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, described him as the most ruthless man he knew, after Rumsfeld sabotaged Kissinger’s arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

He later called Rumsfeld a “skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly”.

However, his traits are coming back to haunt him.

If Rumsfeld has lost the rank and file support, what’s keeping him in office? The answer probably lies in politics.

If Bush gets rid of Rumsfeld he will have to choose a new defence secretary. It will not be deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz because, as the intellectual godfather of the war, he is even more tainted than his boss. So, if Rumsfeld goes, there will be protracted confirmation hearings during the summer that will amount to a post mortem on the post-war plan to date. It would be tantamount to an admission of failure, which could be disastrous for Bush’s re-election campaign.

This is the choice that Bush faces: how to balance the benefits of replacing Rumsfeld with the political costs that may follow. One way has been mentioned: maybe he will swap jobs with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.