New military offensive against
Rumsfeld By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Three years after the fall of
Baghdad and Iraq's disastrous plunge into chaos,
US military brass appear to be engaged in a new
campaign: getting rid of Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld.
While the offensive has
so far been limited to generals who have recently
retired from the service, they claim strong
support for their views on the part of active-duty
officers.
The latest demand for Rumsfeld's
resignation came Wednesday
when
Major General John Batiste, who commanded the
First Infantry Division in Iraq, called for a
"fresh start in the Pentagon".
"We need a
leader who understands teamwork, a leader who
knows to build teams, a leader that does it
without intimidation," Batiste told a CNN
interviewer.
Batiste's remarks, which
follow highly public demands from other top
generals for Rumsfeld's resignation over the past
several weeks, came as public confidence in the
policies of the administration of President George
W Bush, both in Iraq and in the more general "war
on terror", has dwindled to all-time lows.
The growing perception, fueled by recent
disclosures regarding the selective leaking of
intelligence authorized by both Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney, that the administration
consciously tried to manipulate the public into
supporting the Iraq war and to discredit its
critics has contributed to the continuing erosion
in popular support, even among Republicans.
The conviction that Rumsfeld made major
strategic errors by insisting on invading Iraq
with a relatively light force that proved
incapable of imposing order on the country, let
alone suppressing the insurgency that followed,
has also taken hold, particularly after last
month's publication by two New York Times
reporters of an authoritative account of the war,
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq (See ATol's book review).
Based on extensive interviews with both
retired and active-duty officers who took part in
the war, the book found that Rumsfeld and his top
aides believed that Washington could "oust a
dictator, usher in a new era in Iraq, [and] shift
the balance of power in the Middle East in the
United States's favor" on the cheap, and that the
war "would suddenly be brought to an end when the
regime's ministries were seized and its leader
toppled".
The military's unease with
Rumsfeld's plans for going to war date originally
from his summary dismissal in early 2003 of
then-army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki's
testimony before Congress that the occupation of
Iraq would require "several hundred thousand
troops".
Shinseki's effective early
retirement, apparently in retaliation for speaking
out with such candour, was taken by most officers
as a message from Rumsfeld that public
disagreement with his views could have serious
career consequences.
When, by early 2004,
it had become clear that Washington had indeed not
deployed sufficient troops to control Iraq, a
number of retired generals began speaking out
forcefully against Rumsfeld and his civilian
advisers.
In May 2004, the former head of
the US Central Command, retired Marine Gen Anthony
Zinni, accused them of "dereliction of duty" in
failing to prepare adequately for the war and
called on Bush to fire them if they did not
resign.
In recent weeks, Zinni has renewed
those demands, stressing in various public
appearances that Rumsfeld had deliberately ignored
extensive contingency planning developed under his
command in the late 1990s for an Iraq invasion and
overruled officers who raised questions about his
own plans.
In the past three weeks, he has
been joined by three other retired generals,
including Batiste.
In a remarkably frank
New York Times column published on March 19,
retired army Maj Gen Paul Eaton, who had been in
charge of training the Iraqi military during the
first year of the occupation, argued that Rumsfeld
"has shown himself incompetent strategically,
operationally and tactically" and "has put the
Pentagon at the mercy of his cold warrior's view
of the world and his unrealistic confidence in
technology to replace manpower".
"In the
five years Mr Rumsfeld has presided over the
Pentagon," Eaton wrote, "I have seen a climate of
groupthink become dominant and a growing
reluctance by experienced military men and
civilians to challenge the notions of the senior
leadership."
Eaton's blast was followed
this week by an anguished column in Time magazine
by retired Marine Lt Gen Gregory Newbold, the top
operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff
before the invasion, who assailed the brass,
including himself, for "act[ing] timidly when
their voices urgently needed to be heard". "The
consequence of the military's quiescence," he
wrote, "was that a fundamentally flawed plan was
executed for an invented war ...
"My
sincere view is that the commitment of our forces
to this fight was done with a casualness and
swagger that are the special province of those who
have never had to execute these missions - or bury
the results," he asserted, calling for the
replacement of Rumsfeld "and many others unwilling
to fundamentally change their approach".
With his remarks on Wednesday, Batiste,
who retired from the Army in November and whose
forces were based in Tikrit until last May, joined
the rebellion, firmly taking Zinni's side.
"... [W]hen decisions are made without
taking into account sound military
recommendations, sound military decision making,
sound planning, then we're bound to make
mistakes," he said. "You know, it speaks volumes
that guys like me are speaking out from retirement
about the leadership climate in the Department of
Defence."
The generals' revolt also comes
amid a tiff between Rumsfeld and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice who, during a trip to
Britain last week, conceded that Washington made
"tactical errors, thousands of them, I'm sure" in
its invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld replied several
days later, insisting that such mistakes are
inevitable in warfare.
"If someone says,
well, that's a tactical mistake, then I guess it's
a lack of understanding, at least my
understanding, of what warfare is about," he said.
In remarks before a private group in
Chicago on Saturday, former secretary of state
Colin Powell - a four-star general and former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself -
appeared to side with Rice and the generals.
"We made some serious mistakes in the
immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad," he
said. "We didn't have enough troops on the ground.
We didn't impose our will. And as a result, an
insurgency got started, and ... it got out of
control." He did not demand Rumsfeld's
resignation, however.
