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ANALYSIS
Rumsfeld under three-pronged
attack
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- While the United States military continues to explode
real bombs over Baghdad, a full-scale guerrilla war
centered on President George W Bush's Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld appears to have broken out in
earnest back in Washington.
A coalition of
retired senior military officers, moderate Republicans,
and even some civilian hawks who have strongly supported
Rumsfeld's efforts to "transform" the US military is
increasingly taking aim at the Pentagon chief, whom they
accuse of intimidating the uniformed military and
needlessly alienating Washington's European allies.
In a searing column in Wednesday's New York
Times, the former commander of the US central command in
the Persian Gulf region, retired Marine Corps General
Joseph Hoar, even called on Congress to hold hearings on
how the current military campaign in Iraq was conceived
and developed and whether Rumsfeld had prevented senior
officers from testifying to Congress about their
concerns.
Except for a handful of liberals who
have expressed alarm at the eagerness with which
Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisors have taken
Washington to war, Democrats have been reluctant to join
the attacks lest they be accused of being unpatriotic.
But they voted unanimously in key congressional
committees on Tuesday for a supplemental 2004
appropriations bill that denied the Pentagon control
over a US$2.5 billion fund to provide relief and
development assistance in Iraq. The committees instead
earmarked the money for the State Department's Agency
for International Development (USAID).
In
another slap, the House and Senate appropriations
committees also deleted a requested $150 million account
that Rumsfeld had requested for assistance to
unspecified "indigenous forces" involved in the US-led
global "war on terrorism".
Few are suggesting
that Rumsfeld is on the ropes just yet, but it appears
that he and his neo-conservative deputies, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for
Policy Douglas Feith, have never been so isolated, even
as they insist that the war is going their way and that
US troops will soon be in Baghdad.
The attacks
on Rumsfeld and his advisors are being waged on three
fronts: the military conduct of the war; their plans for
the postwar occupation; and their resistance to any
meaningful role for the United Nations, an issue
regarded as especially important to Washington's
traditional European allies.
The attack on the
military front is being waged above all by retired
senior military officers such as Hoar and retired
General Barry McCaffrey, who led armored units in the
1991 Gulf War, as well as with anonymous comments from
officers in the field. They have argued that by
insisting on a fast dash by marines and infantry units
from Kuwait to Baghdad, Pentagon officials have
stretched forces far too thin, creating re-supply
bottlenecks and exposing troops to guerrilla attacks
from rear areas, which Pentagon planners had almost
entirely discounted.
In particular, critics
charge that Rumsfeld and his staff imposed a plan
against the advice of some commanders designed to show
off their ideas about a military "transformation" -
relying more on high-tech weaponry and speed than on the
traditional US doctrine of deploying overwhelming force
at every point of the battlefield.
They argue
that Pentagon assumptions about the Iraqi response - in
essence that Baghdad's forces would crumble and
surrender at the first sound of gunfire - have now been
proved mistaken, so that instead of being able to
advance to Baghdad, coalition forces are now having to
fight unexpected resistance in town after town.
That line of attack from Rumsfeld's critics is
related directly to the Pentagon's plans for occupying
Iraq after the war. The assumption put out by Wolfowitz
and other neo-conservatives inside and outside the
administration before the attack, that the vast majority
of Iraqis would celebrate the arrival of US troops as
"liberators", has been widely discredited, leaving major
questions about the nature and size of the occupation.
Particularly damaging to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
was the way they ridiculed Army Chief of Staff Eric
Shinseki's testimony before Congress prior to the war,
that an occupation could require 200,000 US troops or
more. "Wildly off the mark," Wolfowitz said at the time,
an assertion that not only seemed designed to humiliate
the US Army's senior officer, but that now, after two
weeks of war, appears far too optimistic.
"The
problem with the conduct of the war is that it is laying
the seeds for a very ugly occupation," noted retired
ambassador Chas Freeman, who warned that US troops could
face a situation not dissimilar to that experienced by
Napoleon Bonaparte when he tried to occupy Spain. "It is
fairly incredible that the civilians [in the Pentagon]
inhaled their own propaganda about the welcome that US
forces would receive from the Iraqis," Freeman told
Inter Press Service, adding: "No one who knew anything
about the region ever bought [the notion that US troops
would be welcomed as liberators], but no one who knew
anything about the region was invited to take part in
policy discussions. In this case, there was a sort of
cabalistic exclusion of the experts and an intent to
misrepresent intelligence to sustain the policy."
But the critics' third line of attack may be the
most telling, if only because it is being mounted in
part by individuals who strongly supported the invasion.
In their view, Rumsfeld and his coterie have contributed
most to the dangerous breach that has opened up between
Washington and its European allies on the road to war.
They say that the only way to undo the damage is
to agree with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the
rest of Europe that the UN must play a central role in
any occupation - a position strongly opposed by Pentagon
civilians, who have already designated a retired general
to take over assisted by former Central Intelligence
Agency director James Woolsey, another neo-conservative.
Rumsfeld has insisted that the UN role be confined to
relief and reconstruction and that its personnel report
to the US occupying forces.
But on this issue,
Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even some
neo-conservatives are refusing to go along, opposing any
subordination of the world body to a US viceroy. "The
last thing we need to do is look as though we are
putting in a puppet government," noted the ranking
Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Joseph Biden, who cited Rumsfeld by name as the man
responsible for idea.
"Blair will break with us
over this issue," predicted Freeman. "If we attempt to
pursue a unilateral US military occupation of Iraq, not
only will we be compounding our political problems in
Iraq and with the Arab world, but we also will be
completely isolating ourselves."
(Inter Press
Service)
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