Page 2 of
3 BOOK
REVIEW The man who would be
king Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and
Catastrophic Legacy by
Andrew
Cockburn
Reviewed by Pepe Escobar
the presidency. Upstarts don't
cross a Rockefeller for nothing. Rockefeller made
sure that Rumsfeld was smashed.
The man
who would be king actually got to be king for a
day - in make-believe, of course. A few months
after the start of the
George W Bush presidency, in
1989, he played president in a game devised by a
Washington think-tank to test a program called
Continuity of Government (COG). He always loved
those games. "He was fighting World War III,"
writes Cockburn, adding that he always had "one
primary response. He always tried to unleash the
maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible."
Shock and awe may have been just the prelude for a
nuclear bombing of Iran - were he still in the
Pentagon.
The games evolved. The Reds were
replaced by "terrorists". Rumsfeld felt at home.
His player pals were almost exclusively Republican
hawks. A former Pentagon official tells Cockburn,
"You could say this was a secret
government-in-waiting. The [Bill] Clinton
administration [had] no idea what was going on."
Rumsfeld kept making money - now at General
Instrument. By the end of the 1990s he was worth
"between $50 million and $200 million". Relaxation
on his own spread in Taos, New Mexico, was "to go
out and chainsaw the lower branches of trees".
That Saddam handshake Cockburn
correctly evaluates that "much of the Iraqi
experience, at least from the point of view of
Rumsfeld, was a rerun. Years before, he had
brandished intelligence reports on a growing
military threat. Doubters within the intelligence
community were overridden. He had acted in
alliance with a powerful neo-conservative lobby.
Subsequent investigation revealed that the
intelligence on which he relied was almost
entirely baseless. His actions were a major factor
in the political ruin of the president he served"
(p 35).
Cockburn is of course referring to
the infamous "Team B" work in the mid-1970s - when
Rumsfeld had his first stint as Pentagon chief
under Ford. "Team B" basically lied through its
teeth about Soviet missile capability to endorse
the wildest speculations concocted by the
ultra-powerful, ultra-right-wing
industrial-military complex. As Cockburn writes on
page 41, "The marketing of Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction a quarter-century
later was merely history repeating itself as
tragedy." Cockburn should have added how, as the
tragedy unfolded, the healing powers of US
investigative journalism also mysteriously
vanished.
Cockburn puts into the context
of the 1970s battles over arms control the rise of
the neo-cons as well as the alliance between the
opportunistic Rumsfeld and some of these neo-cons
"that was not to reach its full fruition until the
dawn of the next century". It was already Henry
"Detente" Kissinger against Rumsfeld and Richard
Perle, later to acquire his "Prince of Darkness"
mantle.
Rumsfeld came back from the long
(corporate) cold to be appointed Ronald Reagan's
special envoy to the Middle East in 1983. He knew
absolutely nothing about the Middle East (not that
subsequently he became an expert). So the Middle
East had to fit into his already pre-packaged
answers. Cockburn is especially delighted to
stress that in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Rumsfeld was
praised as "a good listener" (p 76), also
revealing, according to a former Iraqi
intelligence officer, that behind that famous
handshake photo that inundated the Web in early
2003, all Rumsfeld wanted to talk about with
Saddam was business deals, such as an oil pipeline
from Iraq to Aqaba, Jordan, in which Bechtel was
tremendously interested.
When Rumsfeld
went back to Baghdad in 1984, Saddam's army had
already unleashed mustard gas on Iranian troops.
But, as Cockburn writes (p 77), Rumsfeld "was
apparently happy to reassure his hosts that they
should not take objections to what would one day
be called weapons of mass destruction personally.
He was certainly enthusiastic in promoting
business deals between Saddam and Israel."
How I won the war Rumsfeld
became Bush Jr's Pentagon supremo almost by
accident. He was being considered for CIA
director. The Pentagon suggestion to Bush came
from Cheney.
Cockburn delightfully frames
it the Freudian way. Rumsfeld and Bush the Father
hated each other. Bush Jr hated Dad. He needed
father figures - such as Cheney. Rumsfeld, for his
part, had maneuvered Nixon into accepting him as a
protege. He was now maneuvering the extremely
insecure George W Bush to accept him as a pillar
of security - but always making it very clear that
Bush was in charge.
Rumsfeld's "emotional
intelligence" was spot-on. Cockburn: "It was a
relationship that would enable Rumsfeld to change
the president's mind on issues in public, to
ignore decisions that he found inconvenient" (p
98). Perhaps in a flight of fancy, Cockburn states
that Rumsfeld "should be remembered as one of
history's great courtiers". Not "great" in a
Richelieu way, by any means - but uniquely
hubris-prone.
Cockburn carefully details
the Pentagon's Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA), which was conceptualized by former Rand
analyst
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