Wrestling With History

Rumsfeld, apparently, is one.

Why Rumsfeld, one of the smartest, most energetic and most forceful men to serve as secretary of defense, has reached this point is one of the deep riddles of today's Washington. The search for an explanation unfolds through scores of essays and articles, thousands of pages of briefing transcripts and congressional testimony, reams of Pentagon documents and hours of interviews with Rumsfeld watchers inside and outside the military. Few of these interviews could be conducted on the record, because Rumsfeld continues to exert significant control over promotions of those in uniform, and wields influence over Department of Defense contracts with the institutions that employ many outside experts.

Moreover, the war in Iraq has been intensely politicized, to the point that a number of people who agreed to discuss Rumsfeld would not speak on the record because they worried that their assessments would be attacked as politically motivated.

This inquiry also included, at an early stage, an interview with Rumsfeld, in which he was asked to sum up, in general terms, his broad agenda of the past five years. At the end of that conversation, he smiled and said, "Ask me something harder." But repeated requests for a second meeting to pose specific follow-up questions were unavailing. An e-mail containing specific questions was sent to DiRita last month, but neither he nor Rumsfeld responded.

So, return to the beginning: Iraq was not Rumsfeld's decision, nor did he ever formally recommend the invasion. It is not "Rumsfeld's war." His assistant is emphatic on this point. "No. It is America's war," DiRita says.

When Bush drew a bead on Iraq late in 2001, as U.S. forces and allies were taking control of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld was already deeply involved in two wars much closer to home. One was his campaign to remake the Pentagon for the 21st century. The other was a bureaucratic battle with then-Secretary of State Powell. It is impossible to understand Rumsfeld's approach to Iraq outside the context of these earlier, ongoing fights.

First, the war with Colin Powell.

The bitter lawsuits over the 2000 presidential election left Bush under enormous pressure as he chose his first Cabinet. Time was short and the country divided. Bush turned to Powell, a figure so broadly popular that he had been approached about running for vice president by both the Republicans and the Democrats. Powell had foreign policy acumen, military experience and the assurance that comes from years in command -- all areas in which Bush could use a boost.

Still, Powell's prominence and his

politics "raised anxieties" among some important members of the president's inner circle, as journalist James Mann explained in Rise of the Vulcans, his intellectual history of the Bush national security team. The general angered conservatives by favoring affirmative action and abortion rights. And he worried hawks with his Powell Doctrine for war-fighting -- it was much too cautious, they felt.

One of those conservative hawks was Vice President Cheney, whose differences with Powell went back a decade to the first Gulf War. Then, Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Cheney was secretary of defense. Powell tried an end run around Cheney to appeal directly to President George H.W. Bush not to wage war against Iraq. When Cheney discovered Powell's maneuver, he ordered the general to "stick to military matters." Still, Powell succeeded in shaping the Gulf War

strategy according to his principles of decisive force and a clear postwar exit strategy.

This political and personal baggage carried into the new Bush administration. "The overriding dynamic of the Bush foreign policy team," Mann wrote, was an "intense, continuing desire . . . to limit the power and influence of Colin Powell." Job One was to cut off Powell's sway at the Pentagon, an institution he knew as intimately as anyone in government. Cheney and Bush turned to Rumsfeld, Cheney's longtime mentor and pal. Their partnership went back to the Nixon administration, when a young Don Rumsfeld gave an even younger Dick Cheney his first job in the executive branch.

Few men of the past half-century were better suited to intramural bureaucratic combat than Rumsfeld. As a Princeton wrestling champion in the 1950s, his specialty was taking down opponents, an art rooted in quickness, leverage and a ruthless eye for vulnerabilities. He translated these skills to politics and quickly made his reputation on them.

The story has been told many times. How in 1962, after a stint as a Navy fighter pilot, Rumsfeld was elected to Congress at age 30 from suburban Chicago and almost immediately helped organize a coup to oust the veteran House Republican leader, replacing him with genial Gerald R. Ford of Michigan.

How Richard M. Nixon noticed the tough young man and recruited him to run an anti-poverty program. How from that unlikely post, Rumsfeld picked a fight with Nixon's foreign policy guru, Henry A. Kissinger, arguing that Kissinger was too slow to pull out of Vietnam. How Ford found himself president after Nixon's disgrace and called Rumsfeld before he called anyone else. How Rumsfeld, as Ford's chief of staff, pulled off a "Halloween massacre" that finally reduced Kissinger's power over foreign policy, while installing Rumsfeld as the nation's youngest-ever secretary of defense (and moved Cheney up a step, too, making him the youngest White House chief of staff).

How Rumsfeld also orchestrated the dumping of Kissinger's original patron, Nelson A. Rockefeller, as Ford's 1976 running mate.

Fred Ikle, a pillar of the conservative defense establishment, paused a moment when asked to sum up Rumsfeld's style. "Let me put it this way," he said at last, "I would not like to be on the opposite side of an interagency clash from him."

Rumsfeld clashed with Powell almost immediately after Bush was inaugurated in 2001. The issue was China. Powell was quoted characterizing the United States and China as friends, even as Rumsfeld was framing his first major strategic document, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, around the idea of China as a rising threat. Asked about the dispute at the time, Rumsfeld made a joke at Powell's expense. They agreed on "everything," Rumsfeld said, "except those few cases where Colin is still learning."

The laughter stopped as the Iraq invasion approached. According to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, a "cabal" of Rumsfeld and Cheney "flummoxed the process" of planning the war. They carried their ideas in "secret" directly to Bush for decisions; meanwhile Rumsfeld authorized his staff to "tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere."

Anything Powell favored, the Defense Department opposed. Powell suggested more allies; Rumsfeld announced he was ready to go it alone. Powell favored a larger force; Rumsfeld weeded out troops unit by unit. Ultimately, the invasion was a repudiation of the Powell Doctrine in U.S. military affairs. The force deployed was light and lethal -- but not, history has clearly shown, the master of all contingencies. Nor was there a clear exit strategy, merely the hope of garlands and easy reconstruction -- a point war critics have often made and Rumsfeld has never rebutted in detail.

As for Rumsfeld's war on the military culture, Bush fired the first shot in January 2001. Standing alongside his new defense secretary, Bush promised that Rumsfeld would "challenge the status quo inside the Pentagon." This formulation appealed to Rumsfeld, who had spent the quarter-century since his first Pentagon tour in private business, making a fortune by shaking up under-performing companies.

Diving in, he found his marching orders in a speech given by candidate Bush at the Citadel in 1999, calling for a "transformation" of the great but lumbering U.S. military. The Cold War force was built around big foreign bases and heavy weapons "platforms," such as tank columns and aircraft carriers. With the Cold War over, Bush said, America should use the chance to "skip a generation" of weaponry and tactics to seize the future of warfare ahead of everyone else. A transformed military would be lightly armored, rapidly deployable, invisible to radar, guided by satellites. It would fight with Special Operations troops and futuristic "systems" of weaponry, robots alongside soldiers, all linked by computers. This force would be unmatchable in combat, Bush predicted, but it should not be used for the sort of "nation-building" that characterized Pentagon deployments to Haiti and the Balkans under Clinton.

Little of this was entirely new. Since Vietnam, Pentagon leaders -- including the younger Rumsfeld -- had been searching for more efficient, less entangling, ways to project U.S. power. Even the Army, perhaps the most hidebound of the services, had begun a complete reorganization to make itself easier to deploy. "Some things had been done since the end of the Cold War," Rumsfeld conceded in the interview.

But the Pentagon is the world's biggest, richest bureaucracy, with an annual budget larger than the entire economies of all but about a dozen nations -- bigger than Switzerland or Sweden. The leviathan managed to shrug off most deep and lasting changes. Thus, when Rumsfeld took office in 2001, he recalled, "we were located pretty much where we had been located, geographically, around the world. We still had the same processes and systems and approaches."

Some of the most important changes on Rumsfeld's menu were also the toughest, because of the entrenched interests involved. Weapons programs and bases provide jobs in nearly every congressional district. Republican or Democrat doesn't matter when it comes time to protect those jobs, so the programs and the bases endure even after the strategy behind them has expired. Some defense secretaries quail before this status quo, but not Rumsfeld. Shortly after taking office, he began questioning continued funding for the Crusader supercannon, an artillery piece designed to destroy Soviet tank columns that no longer existed, and the Comanche helicopter, another Cold War relic. Such efforts made him a hero in the military think tanks but earned him a lot of enemies on the Hill. By late summer 2001, Washington was buzzing with rumors that Rumsfeld would soon resign.

Then came September 11.

Rumsfeld dazzled the public and his troops with his cool courage on that fateful morning. When American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, he rushed to the sound and shudder of the blast and began rescuing victims. Cheney later told a friend that this moment completely remade Rumsfeld in the eyes of the military, and Rumsfeld seized this second chance.

"The war comes along," Rumsfeld recalled, "and a lot of people said you can't do both -- there's no way you can continue to transform that department and . . . deal with the war simultaneously . . . [But] the war gives an impetus to it, a sense of urgency. One of the things that big institutions need is a sense of urgency. They are so lethargic . . . Well, the war created such a sense of urgency that those things are getting fixed. And they're getting fixed . . . a whale of a lot faster than might otherwise be the case because there's a penalty for not fixing them fast."

Buoyed by early successes of Special Ops forces and satellite-guided bombs in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld turned the run-up to Iraq into a transformation workshop. The Pentagon already had a plan for the possible toppling of Saddam Hussein; it was now taken from the shelf and completely remade under Rumsfeld's steady pressure. Generals and civilians involved in the process endured Rumsfeld's favorite management technique -- a brand of relentless interrogation known as "wirebrushing." Many grew frustrated at the fact that Rumsfeld always had a million questions -- but rarely said openly what he wanted or believed.

Editing and badgering, Rumsfeld cut the troop strength in the invasion plan by more than half, and cut the deployment time by months. Instead of a bombing phase led by the Air Force and Navy, followed by a ground war phase of soldiers and Marines, the secretary pushed for a truly joint operation, all branches of the military working together on a blitz to Baghdad. The dream of America's defense secretaries for a half-century -- genuine cooperation among the military services -- came to life.

Combining the audacity of Grant at Vicksburg with a degree of speed and precision never before seen on Earth, the invasion of Iraq "was the utter vindication of Rumsfeld's transformation," an impressed European diplomat said not long ago. "And," he added, "also its downfall." For there was a crack in this machinery that would be exposed if Iraq was not wrapped up quickly.

Rumsfeld spoke of this internal flaw, briefly and elliptically, during the interview in his office. He was describing the Pentagon as an Industrial Age contraption of rattling "conveyor belts" onto which huge weapons purchases and fat plans are loaded months and even years before they will come to fruition. The belts clatter along, beyond human reach, until finally they dump their loads, whether or not America needs them anymore.

"To have affected it, you had to have affected it five or six years ago -- or at least two or three years ago," Rumsfeld said of the system. So his mission, as he described it, was to get his hands into the machinery and start hauling resources off some belts so he could load new projects onto others. "I've had to reach in and grab all those conveyor belts and try to make them rationalize, one against another." This process of moving resources from belt to belt he calls "balancing risks." As in, the risk of not having a supercannon, compared with the risk of not spending enough money on satellites.

This is where the problem of Iraq came in. Rumsfeld explained that he has had to "balance risks between a war plan -- an investment in something immediately -- and an investment in something in the future." This opened a small window into a very important section of his thinking. Bush recently compared the war in Iraq to World War II, which implies a total commitment. Without a doubt, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, the war effort was the only military conveyor belt worth mentioning. By contrast, Rumsfeld has conceived of Iraq on a smaller scale, as just one of many hungry conveyor belts inside his Pentagon.

He understood that as soon as the Iraq belt started rolling, it would carry resources away from his preferred investments in the future. So he speaks of his job as a matter of reaching onto that belt and pulling stuff off. "Balance" in this context is another word for "limit" -- limit the amount of money, troops, staff and materiel bound for Iraq. The war he wanted was a short one, involving a relatively small force that would start heading home as soon as Saddam was chased from his palaces. When Army generals urged him instead to load the Iraq conveyor belt with enough troops to fully occupy the country -- securing captured weapons depots, patrolling borders, ensuring order -- Rumsfeld saw the large fixed cost involved in recruiting and training thousands of new troops, a cost that would rattle down Pentagon belts for years to come. He tried to balance those risks of chaos against the conveyor belts that could otherwise be loaded with resources destined for future transformation.

It was a gamble, and one he has stuck with through round after round of raised stakes. Of course, the irony is that the Iraq effort has been the opposite of cheap and short. Despite Rumsfeld's best efforts, it is a budget-buster, and one can almost hear the conveyor belts destined for his transformed tomorrow grinding to a halt, one by one.

It is easier to get into something than to get out of it . . .

Another of Rumsfeld's Rules is the reminder that staff members, no matter how senior, are not the president of the United States. This, too, is central to an understanding of Rumsfeld's relationship to the war in Iraq. He didn't tell the president what to do because that wasn't his job. Some decisions, such as the decision to go to war based on a certain set of assumptions and a particular set of plans, belong to the president alone. "George Bush deserves the credit or blame for the war," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. "Rumsfeld gets the credit or blame for the execution."

The next few months could shed a lot of light on the ratio of credit and blame. Progress toward victory would make the earlier mistakes seem smaller. Gen. Casey told Congress in September that the United States has entered a critical period for its counterinsurgency strategy. The tenuous political structure of Iraq will either begin to solidify around the new constitution and next month's parliamentary elections, or it will fall apart. Civil war could doom the attempt to raise and train an Iraqi army that represents all factions of the country. But if, step by step, ordinary Iraqis decide to reject the insurgency and drive out foreign jihadists, then violence should ebb. American public support for the war might rebound. Iraqi troops could take the place of Americans, and U.S. ground troops could start to come home.

That's the hope.

"But if this becomes the next Lebanon," O'Hanlon adds, with the United States withdrawing in haste, and a shattered country left behind, then Rumsfeld's "reputation will go down among the worst secretaries ever."

And what about Rumsfeld's other wars? The first was a rout. Colin Powell has returned to private life, having been dropped, flipped and pinned in short order by the king of the bureaucratic wrestlers. It wasn't really a fair fight -- there was a tinge of World Wrestling Federation tag-teaming when Cheney joined Rumsfeld in pummeling Powell. But the former secretary of state is too much a loyal soldier to talk about it even now, Wilkerson, his former aide, explained.

The verdict on Pentagon transformation may come in February, when Rumsfeld will become the first secretary of defense to publish two Quadrennial Defense Reviews. Congress has mandated these head-to-toe examinations of U.S. defense needs every four years since the early 1990s. Rumsfeld's first QDR was virtually finished on September 11, 2001, and so it barely reflected, in a hastily drafted introduction, the new war on terror.

The new document will show how the hard reality of Iraq has altered Rumsfeld's original futuristic, China-focused vision. Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England is in charge of preparing the QDR, and in a recent interview he sketched a picture different from Rumsfeld's original signature ideas. Robots, computers, missile shields and orbiting lasers address threats that no longer seem as pressing. The someday menace of enemy missiles has faded compared with today's car bombs, suicide vests and that medieval remnant, beheadings.

This time around, England said, attention will be given to various back-office reorganizations that will surely glaze the eyes of those who once thrilled to Rumstud. "The business practices, and acquisition process, and the personnel systems for human capital management," England listed. "That's of great interest to Secretary Rumsfeld and to me." Even among Demo-cratic defense experts, Rumsfeld gets a lot of credit for tackling these dull-but-important issues. Still, speeding up the hiring of Arabic speakers, or streamlining the process for acquiring the next-generation of bomb detectors -- while of great value -- is a far cry from changing the very nature of war.

In that sense, perhaps the greatest transformation at the Pentagon during Rumsfeld's tenure will turn out to be the transformation of Donald Rumsfeld.

Even so, Iraq still won't loom largest on Rumsfeld's horizon. As England, his deputy, put it: Iraq "is just a small part of a long war in many places."

So finish there, with the "long war in many places"? How is that going?

Gen. Abizaid, the senior officer in the Central Command -- which covers Iraq, Afghanistan and many other hot spots -- appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee not long ago. He said he saw progress in Iraq, but mostly wanted to talk about the "al Qaeda threat as the main threat that we face."

"Its global reach and its ability to inflict damage should not be underestimated," Abizaid said. "This enemy seeks to acquire weapons of mass destruction and will certainly use such weapons if they obtain them . . . They experimented with anthrax in Afghanistan. They tried to develop crude chemical weapons in Afghanistan. They are always talking about how they might develop a radiological dispersal device. If they could buy or acquire a nuclear weapon, they would. This is not my guess, this is what they say. It's well known they want to do this, and they'll stop at nothing."

Abizaid continued through a catalogue of fears both urgent and numbingly familiar. Neither journalists nor senators seemed to be paying rapt attention, and so there was little comment when the general reached his conclusion. Which was:

A full four years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the bombing of the Pentagon, America's national security apparatus is still not properly arranged for the fight against terrorism. "We are not yet organized to the extent that we need to be to fight this enemy," Abizaid said. "We have time to do that, but we need to seize the moment."

Rumsfeld, seated with Abizaid at the witness table, might find in those words a mission worthy of his energy and passion. Iraq may have cost him his chance to remake the wars of the future. But there is still the unfinished job of getting ready for the war we're in right now.

David Von Drehle is a staff writer on the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.