Rumsfeld Should Go

The open and ongoing discussion about Donald Rumsfeld’s suitability as the civilian overseer of the American armed forces continues unabated. In my opinion he should be fired. I also think that the decision to fire him should not be swayed at all by the various retired generals who are now openly offering their criticism of his ability.

Simply put Rumsfeld should go for two different reasons: first he failed totally in his Iraq policy. He was perfectly correct in his assessment of the force needed to topple Saddam’s regime. In fact the success of the invasion vindicates much of Rumsfeld’s military thinking: the coordinated and highly concentrated, high tech combined force he deployed is very much a reflection of his philosophy. His abject failure came after the initial success. He totally underestimated the need to apply a large scale and long lived occupation force. In other words his downfall should come as a result of his inability to realize that while modern warfare can be waged by smaller, lighter armies, policing is still an old fashioned “boots on the ground” process. He neglected the need for policing. His arrogance prevented him from adequately foreseeing the consequences of an invasion, despite the vast array of evidence available to him that suggested his view was wrong. For this he should pay the price.

The second reason he should go has nothing to do with Iraq. It is that his reform efforts have evidently not fully penetrated the thinking of the armed forces. The Pentagon remains a vast and under supervised money drain. It still pursues excessively expensive projects that seem to have little to do with the burden of the military’s current mission: for instance the development of a new generation of fighter planes that have no credible enemy to fight; and the single minded pursuit of a Star Wars defense despite its obvious and well reported failure. I do not dispute that a large military budget is a necessity for the United States, but it appears that the way in which the budget is being spent needs a close examination. Rumsfeld has failed to rein in spending and divert it towards counter terrorism and policing, both of which are high priorities currently. He has failed to restrain the lobbying ability of his military advisors and their power to spend money on their pet projects rather than in the national interest. This is why the criticism by generals should be treated with skepticism: they have an interest in maintaining the military as a political lobbying force. The military needs to be de-politicized, not encouraged to participate in political debate.

Put more succintly: he has failed to exert proper civilian control over the armed forces in terms of establishing purposeful priorities while he apparently exerted too much control in terms of execution.

Of course when declared this way my criticism of him is also a criticism of the entire Bush regime. No one in the current regime has any more right to survive the Iraq failure than Rumsfeld. It is simply that Rumsfeld is the man in the hot seat and should go first.

Also: I think that the current quagmire in Iraq represents in microcosm a failure of the entire country to come to terms with the consequences of its actions: an empire like the American needs to be run and powered appropriately. Invasions naturally lead to occupations, which, in turn, inevitably lead to long term presences around the world. The notion that America always leaves quickly after it has “liberated” a country is a myth: it still has tens of thousands of troops in Germany, Japan and South Korea fifty years after “liberating” them. And whole chunks of its own territory are essentially occupations of Mexican land seized at gunpoint a century and a half ago. Politicians of both parties need to stop denying the nature of American power and start educating Americans into the ways of empire. That way future adventures can be explicitly organized as long term invasions and occupations. The American public will stop clamoring to “get the troops home soon” since they will realize that a long term garrison will be inevitable; and the invaded populace will have the necessary time to sort itself out without having to rush to a timetable established by the American need to avoid casualties. More to the current point: local resistance will be seen as futile because the Americans will be seen as a long term opponent rather than a “fly by night” liberator who, with a little patience, can be defeated, not through military force but through boredom and exingency of its domestic political demands.