LATE FLASH: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down and will be replaced by former CIA Director Robert M Gates. "Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed the time is right for new leadership at the Pentagon,'' Bush said at a White House news conference on Wednesday.
When the news broke on Saturday that the lead editorial in the Gannet-owned
Army Times newspaper group had called for US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's resignation, the cable news organizations portrayed the announcement
as if it were a blow like no other.
Actually, this was the second time the Times group - which includes the Navy,
Marine Corps, and Air Force Times - had called for Rumsfeld's resignation. But
with the mid-term elections on Tuesday and the obviously deteriorating
situation in Iraq, this
latest call appeared to be politically motivated. Robert Hodierne, the managing
editor of the Times group, denied the charge. According to Hodierne, President
George W Bush's stated intention to retain the defense secretary for the next
two years prompted the decision to protest Rumsfeld's continued tenure.
Significantly, this editorial comes from a news group that focuses entirely on
the military. Its reporters cover virtually every military installation and
defense industry outside the "black" or covert budget. The Army Times is sold
on every military base and is available in many military commissaries. It is
read by personnel on active duty as well as by the National Guard and reserve
components. For these reasons, the story made a splash over the weekend.
Finding fault
But the editorial did not, in my view, go far enough in its pinning full
responsibility on Rumsfeld for the debacle in Iraq. Without question, he bears
much responsibility. But as president, George W Bush is ultimately responsible
for whatever occurs or does not occur on his watch. Moreover, the generals
prosecuting the war are also responsible for the advice they have given to the
civilians in the Pentagon and the White House.
For example, the editorial notes that despite the "best efforts of trainers",
the Iraqis are still not able to operate on their own. But for many months
after Bush declared "mission accomplished", there were no US trainers or a
coherent training program in Iraq. Moreover, some US personnel subsequently
sent as trainers lacked the extensive background needed to be effective.
The editorial points out that troops consistently reported that Iraqi recruits
had no sense of national identity, that all they wanted was a paycheck.
Responsibility for destroying any vestige of the organizational structures or
symbols around which the Iraqi people could rally lies squarely at the feet of
Paul Bremer and the narrow circle of neo-cons who occupied Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
Perhaps more damningly, the Army Times editorial says that "colonels and
generals ... asked their bosses for more troops" and the "service chiefs ...
asked for more money".
But if the Times editorial is correct about the request for more troops, then
someone in the chain of command is not telling the truth. There is, in other
words, a weak link somewhere in the chain that runs from colonels (brigade and
regimental commanders) and two-star generals (division commanders) to the
three-star commander of US forces in Iraq to General George Casey as commander
of all coalition forces in Iraq to General John Abizaid as head of Central
Command to Rumsfeld and then Bush.
Repairing the damage
In a democracy, such failures should lead to two immediate actions.
First, Congress must exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities,
which it has so spectacularly and so often failed to do in the Iraq
misadventure. Congress has not held probing hearings to find out who is
short-circuiting the requests for more troops and money. It has failed to
consider what, if any, institutional or bureaucratic remedies are possible. And
because the lessons that should have emerged from such a thoroughgoing
investigation do not see the light of day, the United States will be less able
to overcome the inevitable propensity to fight - and lose - the next war. As
such, Congress is completely complicit in the failure of the administration and
in the deaths of those it sends to fight.
Second, the Joint Chiefs of Staff should take the one step that could have
attenuated, if not ended, this Iraq misadventure: denounce the war publicly and
then immediately hand in their resignations. The Times editorial, surprisingly,
doesn't connect these dots.
According to Mark Perry, who has written a detailed account of the early years
of the Joint Chiefs as an institution, US generals and admirals have long been
uncomfortable with backing a foreign and defense policy not of their own at
least partial formulation. This issue first surfaced publicly in 1949 during
Harry Truman's presidency. But this so-called "revolt of the admirals" was not
clear-cut, for the policy dimension was masked as inter-service rivalry between
the air force and navy aviation over control of the US nuclear arsenal. (The
air force, with a unified position and better public relations, won.)
The issue resurfaced during the Vietnam War, and this time policy, not rivalry,
was the issue. In 1967, defense secretary Robert McNamara was lobbying for
continued massive increases in US ground forces in South Vietnam, whereas all
of the chiefs believed that no amount of US forces could win the unwinnable.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle Wheeler, proposed to the other
chiefs that they resign en masse to protest the "immoral" policy that would
doom thousands more US soldiers. Wheeler and the chiefs saw McNamara's
testimony as "a rupture of the unofficial contract between our democracy's
civil and military powers, whereby the military pledges to obey the civil
authorities without question but in return the civilian leaders implicitly
pledge that their policies will not cause needless loss of life". Ultimately,
however, Wheeler reversed course and decided to work from within to change
policy rather than in effect "mutiny" and leave the forces leaderless.
Ever since, whenever a similar dispute over policy has come up, the argument of
"staying in and working to change policy" has prevailed. But between Vietnam
and the present war in Iraq, US military forces have not been in prolonged
combat. Today we have reached a tipping point in Iraq. In an interview last
week, Vice President Dick Cheney said that administration policy in Iraq and on
the "war on terrorism" would not change regardless of who wins the mid-term
elections. This, in a democracy?
Dan Smith is a military-affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a
retired US Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends
Committee on National Legislation. E-mail at dan@fcnl.org or blog The
Quakers' Colonel.
