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It's snowing on Rumsfeld's
parade
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- They normally come in the form of simple, one or
two-paragraph queries, affectionately, and sometimes not
so affectionately, referred to by his underlings and
colleagues as "snowflakes".
But Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld's latest flakes blew in like a freak
autumn blizzard, catching official Washington off-guard
and leaving spokespersons scrambling for guidance on how
to reassure reporters, Congress and the public that,
yes, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan really are
completely under control.
The leak of a dour,
two-page memo addressed to four of Rumsfeld's top aides
and filled with a series of fundamental questions that
most experts would have expected to have been thought
out long ago is the latest indication of serious
disarray - even self-doubt - among the Bush
administration hawks who led the march to war in Iraq.
Coming two weeks into a major administration
public relations campaign to persuade the public that
things in Iraq are going much better than the press is
reporting and on the eve of a donors' conference in
Madrid designed to persuade US allies to cough up
billions of dollars in reconstruction aid for Iraq, the
timing for airing Rumsfeld's worries could not be much
worse.
The memo, which appeared in USA Today on
Wednesday and, among other things, confirms that the
Pentagon has failed even to establish benchmarks in its
"global war on terror" to measure whether it is winning
or losing, comes on top of a number of other
embarrassments this week around the US-led occupation of
Iraq.
They began with the continuing
reverberations from last week's disclosure that the
Pentagon official in charge of tracking down former
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the leadership of
al-Qaeda, Lieutenant-General William Boykin, is
something of a Christian fanatic.
Boykin has
appeared in uniform in churches around the country over
the past two years proclaiming, among other things, that
the enemy in the "war on terrorism" is "a guy named
Satan" and that the god worshipped by Muslims is "an
idol".
While several powerful lawmakers,
including leading Republicans, demanded that Boykin
immediately step down, or at least be reassigned to a
less sensitive post, the Pentagon said only that it
would investigate if he violated any laws or
regulations, but that no further action was being
considered.
The next blow came from abroad.
After wrangling for months to get a clearly reluctant
Turkish parliament to authorize the contribution of as
many as 10,000 troops to US-led occupation forces in
Iraq, the administration hinted this week that it may
soon cancel the idea in the face of unanimous opposition
from its hand-picked Governing Council in Baghdad.
Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the Turkish
deployment - the parliament's endorsement of which
earlier this month was touted as a major diplomatic
breakthrough - would go forward only if an arrangement
could be worked out that was "satisfactory to [the
Turks], satisfactory to the Iraqis and satisfactory to
the coalition".
"Whether or not they will
ultimately find a method of satisfying everybody, I
don't know," Rumsfeld said, adding he still hoped the
plan could be salvaged. But the Los Angeles Times
reported that the chief of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) in Iraq, L Paul Bremer, has formally
recommended the idea be abandoned.
The Pentagon
views Turkish troops as particularly desirable because
their military and peacekeeping experience would enable
them to actually replace US troops in the field, rather
than simply act as auxiliary units for defending fixed
targets such as oil pipelines.
It was also felt
that Turkey's participation would encourage other
predominantly Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and
Bangladesh, to contribute troops, thus reducing the
ability of Islamic militants to depict the occupation as
similar to the Crusades of the Middle Ages.
But
with the Turkish option fading, it appears that
administration hopes for drawing down US troop levels to
less than one-half of the 130,000 troops in Iraq now by
the end of 2004 were unrealistic. That assessment, in
turn, means that yet more reservists will have to be
deployed to Iraq, further straining an overstretched and
increasingly demoralized army.
The US commander
in Iraq disclosed on Wednesday that attacks on US troops
there have increased sharply in October, reaching a high
of 35 a day, compared to between 10 and 15 attacks in
July and August.
Military officials argued that
the rise in attacks mostly reflected more aggressive
tactics by US forces, particularly in Sunni-dominated
western provinces, where troops had previously asserted
only a modest presence.
But analysts in the US
said the growing attacks also indicate that the
resistance continues to grow and spread to regions that
have been relatively quiet.
Despite the bad
news, the administration remained officially upbeat this
week with Vice President Dick Cheney, for example,
telling Republican donors on Monday, "we are rolling
back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its
power, in the Middle East".
While that may be
the official line, pundits and Democrats noted on
Thursday, Rumsfeld's private doubts tell a different
story. While the Pentagon chief's penchant for
constantly sprinkling his "snowflakes" - questions,
proddings, suggestions - all over the national security
bureaucracy, his October 16 memo seemed, as USA Today
called it, especially grim.
Consisting
essentially of a series of questions, it is particularly
notable for the lack of confidence it expresses in the
ability of both the Pentagon and the intelligence
agencies to effectively prosecute the "war on terror".
"It is not possible to change the DoD
[Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully
fight the global war on terror," he complains,
suggesting that perhaps a new institution should be
created "either within the DoD or elsewhere - one that
seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several
departments and agencies on this key problem".
Rumsfeld writes that the war against al-Qaeda
has so far yielded only "mixed results" and that US
forces have made "somewhat slower progress tracking down
the Taliban" in Afghanistan.
Perhaps most
strikingly, he indicates that the Pentagon has never
devised specific benchmarks for assessing progress in
its anti-terrorism campaign. "Today, we lack metrics to
know if we are winning or losing the global war on
terror," he adds. "Are we capturing, killing or
deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than
the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical
clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against
us?" he asks, exclaiming later, "the cost-benefit ratio
is against us! Our cost is billions against the
terrorists' costs of millions ... is our current
situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we
get'?"
On the record, administration officials
described the memo as a reflection of just the kind of
critical process that is needed to prevail in a long,
drawn-out war. Off the record, they admitted that the
questions were not exactly ones that inspired
confidence.
The Democrats jumped on the leak.
"Secretary Rumsfeld is only now acknowledging what we've
known for some time," said retired General Wesley Clark,
who is running for the Democratic presidential
nomination, "that this administration has no plan for
Iraq and no long-term strategy for fighting terrorism."
(Inter Press Service)
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