Rumsfeld's Legacy: The Iraq Syndrome?

With the Cold War at its most tense, the Kennedy administration found military views as reckless as they were confused. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK's generals dismissed all policies other than an invasion of Cuba as tantamount to appeasement. To the civilians, it seemed that the generals did not really want to accept responsibility for military operations, because they always presented stark alternatives -- either the massive use of force, if necessary including nuclear weapons, or nothing at all. When they were urged by Kennedy to prepare for a more subtle counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam, their enthusiasm was well contained. They saw little point in a "hearts and minds" campaign and, when given the chance, they reverted with some relief back to "search and destroy."

After Vietnam, the military steered as clear as possible from operations that depended in any way on winning over local populations. If there were to be future wars, they insisted , only overwhelming force should be used (a view that came to be associated with Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Indeed in doctrine, training and contingency planning, the military's dominant focus was major war. The Persian Gulf War was taken as confirming the validity of this approach. By contrast, the painful withdrawals from Beirut in 1984 and Somalia a decade later were seen as demonstrating the folly of getting drawn into messy civil wars.

These events, along with the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, encouraged the view that the best way to keep popular support for operations was to keep casualties to a minimum. This meant that force protection was the first priority in any operation, and this could be achieved if the U.S. contribution was confined to air power. The Army was for proper wars; lesser operations such as peacekeeping were best left to allies or, in the case of counterterrorism, to the CIA.

When Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, he did not disagree with the Army's reluctance to get involved in nation-building, but he was still exasperated. During his first term as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, he had been an early enthusiast for what was called even then the "revolution in military affairs," looking to combine new information technologies with precision munitions as a means of gaining a comparative edge in regular war. He was appalled to discover how much the forces were still fixated on preparing for big wars and purchasing high-profile weapons platforms rather than developing smaller, nimbler forces geared to the actual contingencies he thought they were likely to face.

Rumsfeld's "transformation agenda" put him on a collision course with the generals. Rumsfeld followed his instincts and initially could claim vindication in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the problems came as the wars took on a more irregular character. In Afghanistan, much of the al Qaeda leadership, including Osama bin Laden, managed to get away, and in Iraq a swift occupation gave way to a protracted and bloody insurgency.

More troops on the ground would have helped. For postwar Iraq, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki made the case for a deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, famously observed that he found it "hard to conceive" that it would take "more forces to provide stability in a post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army." He was sadly mistaken. He and Rumsfeld accepted claims that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as liberators and showed a remarkable lack of prudence or even curiosity about the ways in which the invasion could turn sour.

Rumsfeld's management style has left him with few supporters and vulnerable to the charge that everything that has gone wrong in Iraq is because he ignored military advice.

Rumsfeld's fault lay less in his readiness to challenge military views -- which often deserved challenging -- but in asking the wrong questions. It is certainly not the case that if only military advice had been followed in Iraq, everything would have been well. In reality the blame for the morass should be shared, for the fault also lies in the U.S. military's insistence on preparing for wars they would prefer to fight rather than those they might need to fight.

The shortage of troops, which meant that they were spread too thinly, aggravated a problem that had deeper roots. U.S. training and doctrine provided little preparation for the demands of irregular war, and the importance of thinking through the local political consequences of military engagements. Instead it was the domestic political consequences of American casualties that made force protection such a priority and led to a cavalier attitude toward Iraqi casualties.

The starting point for the American troubles was that in the process of liberating the Iraqi people, U.S. forces killed far too many of them. When combined with Abu Ghraib and Rumsfeld's tendency to dismiss in an off-hand, "stuff happens" way any criticisms of the developing mayhem in Iraq, it is not surprising that Arab skepticism about U.S. intentions has grown.

Iraq is not an experiment that future U.S. governments will care to repeat. For the moment, even this administration is unable to repeat it, because there are no ground forces to spare for major campaigns elsewhere. Unless it proves possible to gain the upper hand against the insurgents, a bungled war will leave the United States weaker and not stronger. The confidence in American power that led to war being initiated without direct provocation has been shaken. Whenever the possible use of force is raised again, assurances will be sought that this will not be "another Iraq." And future interventionists will worry about how to shake off the Iraq syndrome.

Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London, is the author of "Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam" (Oxford University Press).