Wrestling With History

Why the conflict that has cost 2,000 American lives may not be Donald Rumsfeld's No. 1 priority.

Doubts about Rumsfeld's priorities have been widespread in Iraq almost from the beginning. Soldiers wondered why they were doing heavy-armor fighting in unarmored trucks. Commanders scratched their heads when Rumsfeld insisted, at a Pentagon news briefing in 2003, that the ongoing war outside their windows wasn't "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." Kurdish leaders, concerned about a Pentagon cut-and-run, declined to disband their ethnic militias. "They say, 'Put a permanent U.S. base up here and we'll be glad to,'" one Kurdish representative explains.

Such questions took root in Washington a bit later, however. A turning point came in September 2004, with a pair of columns written by the well-sourced conservative Robert Novak. Many pro-war insiders believed that Rumsfeld was the origin of Novak's startling declaration that "inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is a strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying, Ready or not, here we go." Bush quickly shot down the trial balloon, but Novak stood fast, pointedly boasting in a follow-up piece that Rumsfeld had not repudiated the original column.

West Point military historian Frederick Kagan soon published a scathing assessment of Rumsfeld's war leadership. A supporter of the decision to invade Iraq, Kagan was appalled that Rumsfeld had not shifted his fabled intensity from visions of future warfare to the burgeoning war of today. "The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America's military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission," Kagan wrote in Kristol's magazine. "In no previous American war has the chief of the military administration refused to focus on the war at hand." Defenders rose to Rumsfeld's side. The venerable conservative magazine National Review, while critical of Rumsfeld for underestimating the "magnitude of the task that rebuilding and occupying Iraq would present," opened its pages to rebuttals of Kristol's neocon journal. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution chalked up America's troubles in Iraq to the huge cuts in active-duty troops that were begun by the first President Bush and continued under President Clinton. "In reality, [Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to spare elsewhere -- and all for reasons beyond his control," Hanson argued.

Others praised Rumsfeld's creativity in squeezing the most from existing troop levels by moving uniformed soldiers and officers out of jobs that civilians could fill instead. Some writers and politicians who could find little to praise in Rumsfeld's handling of post-invasion Iraq nevertheless hailed his willingness to cut outmoded weapons programs and shift forces away from Cold War bases.

"Mr. Rumsfeld, standing on his remarkable record of achievement, is far too effective a defense secretary for any serious student of recent American history to think that he should be replaced," former House speaker Newt Gingrich summed up in the Baltimore Sun.

The man himself seems impervious to these storms. As Rumsfeld reflected on his eventful tenure from an armchair near his big desk last summer, the most striking thing about him was how upbeat he appeared to be. Public support for the Iraq war was plunging. Criticism of him was spreading among the military brass and through Congress. Learned essays were circulating through war colleges and think tanks describing an Army near the breaking point under the pressure of the war -- equipment wearing out 15 times faster than anticipated, the divorce rate among officers tripled. Yet Rumsfeld radiated good cheer as he described his invigorating tussles with a Pentagon bureaucracy that is, by his reckoning, not much advanced beyond inkwells and steam.

His staff reflects that sunny superiority. "The ramparts of Washington are littered with the bleached bones of people who said Donald Rumsfeld was not going to survive," DiRita says happily. Rumsfeld's serenity comes from a distinctive blend of freshness and age. DiRita describes his boss as thirsty for new knowledge and also supremely confident in himself, able to make tough decisions without fretting or second-guessing. "He is always looking forward. He has a sense of himself, and the president likes that," the assistant says. "When you know who you are, you're pretty comfortable with the scrutiny that comes from public service."

At 73, Rumsfeld is the oldest person ever to run the Pentagon, having also been the youngest when he was appointed for his first tour in 1975. Yet, apart from a slight hearing loss that can seem to wax or wane depending on whether he likes what he is hearing, he bears little sign of age. His back is straight, eyes are clear, body is lean, mind is sharp, and he enjoys whipping much younger men in his afternoon squash matches. Only two secretaries of defense have served longer -- Robert McNamara in the 1960s and Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s -- and Rumsfeld shows no sign of flagging.

If only he could have had the war he wanted, instead of the war he got. Rumsfeld hoped and intended that Iraq would be a proving ground for his theories about a new era of warfare -- fast, light, "agile," high-tech and overwhelming. Instead, Iraq is an old-fashioned war, hot and dusty, of foot soldiers, fortified camps, checkpoints and armor. Rumsfeld stubbornly clung to his hope even after most others had faced reality. The CIA concluded by June 2003, two months after the liberation of Baghdad, that the United States was facing a "classic insurgency," but Rumsfeld specifically denied it until he was publicly corrected by his able commander, Army Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid.

Perhaps this is understandable, because the implications of the insurgency -- namely, a long, expensive military and political commitment -- were potentially ruinous for Rumsfeld's larger, futuristic agenda. But the reluctance of the man at the top of the Pentagon to come to grips with the reality on the ground had an impact, according to retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who surveyed Iraq last summer and reported on his findings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

McCaffrey did not mention the secretary of defense by name in his report. But his terse, grim recounting of America's first 22 months in Iraq led directly to Rumsfeld's door.

"The enterprise was badly launched," McCaffrey wrote. The U.S. invasion "left a nation without an operational State." Rumsfeld's "overwhelmed, under-resourced" appointees were feckless in filling that void. Mistakes were made with alacrity, but effective corrections seemed to take forever. A year passed before the United States began serious and effective training of new security forces for Iraq -- indeed, the United States transferred sovereignty to a provisional Iraqi government in June 2004 without any competent Iraqi military or police units to defend that government. In the meantime, Iraq devolved into "a weak state of warring factions."