RUMSFELD'S TRANSFORMATION

Which leads to last week's third secret. Iraq remains the urgent focus of America's largest deployed force; it is a key to U.S. foreign policy and determines the political terrain at home. But it has been reduced to the status of a troubled subsidiary in the corporate flow chart of Rumsfeld's Pentagon: off-budget for accounting purposes, and, apparently, incidental to future strategy.

The same day the QDR was delivered to Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally released "The National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism." This 40-pager, long in development, was intended to settle a number of disputes inside the military over exactly who we are fighting, and how. The NMSP-WOT, as the chiefs call it, is "the authoritative document to describe the nature of the war, the nature of the enemy, and the military strategy to face the enemy."

The Iraq effort was mentioned precisely once in the plan, in passing, in what sounds like the past tense. "In extreme circumstances," the plan explains, "the military leads efforts toward cessation of state and nonstate support of terrorism, as exemplified by operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, to oust regimes that supported terrorists and stabilize the countries afterward."

True, strategic plans are supposed to soar far above tactical specifics. General discussions in the strategy about building up "moderate" Islam as a way to isolate and discredit extremists had obvious applications for Iraq.

Still, the strategy won't ease the frequent complaints, off the record, by officers home from Iraq, that visiting the Pentagon can be like visiting a distant planet where the war is just a speck in the sky.

But at least the military folks are thinking about such matters. Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, charged last week that the civilian agencies are just about AWOL. "We're not pulling together, all elements of our government, with equal force," Warner said at a hearing on the Pentagon budget.

The detail from last week that may reverberate most powerfully is that the "long war" against bin Ladenism cannot be waged only with troops. An article in Policy Review, written by a former State Department brain named Tony Corn, landed on a number of desks last week. Conservative, chewy, cantankerous, the piece was a bid to focus feuding Washington institutions on a common mission as big as the Cold War.

"The State Department as an institution appears unable to make the transition from a bureaucratic to a strategic way of thinking," Corn observed, while the Pentagon has trouble dealing with the cultural abyss that underlies Islamic extremism.

Plucking a stunning statistic from yet another bureaucratic report -- a 2002 study by the United Nations of the sad state of development in the Arab world -- Corn noted that "the number of books translated by the whole Arab world over the past thousand years is equivalent to the numbers of books translated by Spain in one year." It's no wonder that a few rich and purposeful leaders in the Islamic world can exercise great influence over countries that modernity has so dramatically passed by. That's a problem created over decades and centuries.

His conclusion summed up the subtle revelations of the week: America has the money, the might and even the thinkers to find its way through this mess. But do we have the time and the patience?

Author's e-mail: vondrehled@washpost.com

David Von Drehle is a Washington Post staff

writer.