WASHINGTON - In the old Hollywood westerns, the
white settlers circle the wagons to defend themselves
against attacks by the Indians until the cavalry can
arrive to rescue them and chase off their assailants.
But in Washington over the past few days, it seems that
the cavalry has joined the Indians.
US President
George W Bush, backed by his vice president and national
security adviser, have been circling the wagons to
defend Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since the White
House told reporters that the president had given him a
mild rebuke over the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.
But the embattled Pentagon chief may have made
too made enemies - particularly within his armed forces
- to be saved.
While Bush praised Rumsfeld for
"doing a superb job" during a rare visit to the Pentagon
on Monday morning, his words were somehow unable to
overcome the distinct sounds of knives being sharpened
in the hallways just outside, as well as across town on
Capitol Hill and at the State Department, where
Secretary of State (and former army general) Colin
Powell compared the possible impact on US foreign policy
of the abuse photographs to the 1969 disclosure of the
infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
The big
news of the day was that the Army Times, which, along
with the major dailies of the other armed services is
published by a private company, called for both Rumsfeld
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard
Myers, to step down in light of the scandal surrounding
the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison
outside Baghdad.
"This was not just a failure of
leadership at the local command level," said the Army
Times lead editorial, which also appeared in the other
service newspapers. "This was failure that ran straight
to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if
that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of
war." It said Rumsfeld's moves from the outset of the
"war on terror" had delivered the message to the US
troops that "anything goes".
The editorial said
that the soldiers caught in photographs and videos
abusing prisoners are referred to around the Pentagon as
"the six morons who lost the war". "But the folks in the
Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons," it said.
Responsibility, it said, "extends all the way up the
chain of command to the highest reaches of the military
hierarchy and its civilian leadership".
The
editorial came as new photos documenting abuses -
including prison dogs attacking a naked Iraqi detainee -
were published by newspapers across the country on
Monday morning, and reflected a growing sense that the
scandal is far from playing out, if only because many of
Rumsfeld's - and the Bush administration's - critics see
the abuse crisis as symptomatic of all that has gone
wrong in Iraq and the "war on terrorism".
Foremost among these are the ex-military and
even active-duty military who have become increasingly
outspoken about their unhappiness with the way the war
has been conducted.
A number of prominent
retired officers, such as the former head of the US
Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, and his
counterpart in the Southern Command, General Barry
McCaffrey, have warned for more than a year that
Rumsfeld, in his zeal to "transform" the military into a
"leaner, meaner" global force, was dangerously
overstretching the US Army, particularly in Iraq.
Top army officers have also made little secret
of their resentment of the way Rumsfeld and Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - who, like other top
Pentagon civilians in the Bush administration have never
served in combat - dismissed the former army chief of
staff, General Eric Shinseki.
Shinseki
presciently warned before the war that at least 200,000
troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after an invasion.
Wolfowitz denounced that estimate as "wildly off the
mark", while, in a major break with tradition, neither
Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz attended Shinseki's farewell
ceremony, where he cautioned against "a 12-division
strategy for a 10-division army".
What began as
the shouts of a few top retired officers when the first
Abu Ghraib photos were published 10 days ago has now
become a veritable clamor. The Army Times editorial is
just the latest, if most striking, example.
"Rumsfeld is paying the price for the way he has
run the department of defense for more than three years,
but the price is being paid by George W Bush," wrote
Robert Novak, a Washington Post columnist whose close
ties to the military brass go back more than 30 years.
"From the first month of the Bush
administration, I have heard complaints from old
military hands - some in uniform, some not - that the
new secretary's arrogance and insularity were creating a
dysfunctional Pentagon," he wrote in a column that also
quoted the private intelligence group, Stratfor
(Strategic Forecasting), as concluding that Rumsfeld has
"consistently managed to get the strategic and
organizational questions wrong".
Even more
remarkable, perhaps, was the a front-page article on
Sunday by the Post's veteran military correspondent, Tom
Ricks, titled, "Dissension Grows in Senior Ranks on War
Strategy". The article quoted army Major General Charles
Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in
Iraq, as insisting that US forces were winning the war
in Iraq at the tactical level but, "strategically, we
are [losing it]."
The article also cited army
Colonel Paul Hughes, the first director of strategic
planning for the US occupation in Iraq, as comparing the
situation there with the US defeat in Vietnam: "Unless
we have coherency in our policy, we will lose
strategically," he said, adding, "We don't understand
the war we're in."
"It is doubtful we can go on
much longer like this," said one unidentified "senior
general" at the Pentagon who pointed to Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz as responsible for the lack of adequate
planning before the invasion. "The American people may
not stand for it - and they should not."
Ricks
reported that a number of his interviewees had stressed
that Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides were the object
of a "profound anger [that] is building within the
army".
That anger may well be responsible for
the most significant defection to date among Republican
lawmakers from the White House line that calls from
members of the Democratic Party for Rumsfeld's
resignation are politically motivated.
On
Sunday, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated
Vietnam veteran and member of the Armed Services
Committee, said in a TV interview on the CBS network:
"It's still in question whether ... Rumsfeld and, quite
frankly, General Myers can command the respect and the
trust and the confidence of the military," given their
handling of the prison abuse scandal.
He was
followed on the television program by another more
conservative Republican senator who also served in the
military, Lindsey Graham. He echoed Democratic
arguments, saying he believed the scandal indicated a
"systemic failure" and that "we just don't want a bunch
of privates and sergeants to be the scapegoats here".
Their remarks came on the heels of the widely
quoted statement last week by a senior conservative
Democrat and veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam
wars, congressman John Murtha, that the conflict in Iraq
was "unwinnable".
Murtha, who is regarded as
particularly close to the uniformed military and who
strongly supported the invasion, has travelled
frequently to Iraq since last July.
