Page 3 of
3 BOOK
REVIEW The man who
would be king Rumsfeld: His Rise,
Fall and Catastrophic Legacy by
Andrew
Cockburn
Reviewed by Pepe Escobar
Andrew Marshall. Stripped down to
the bone, RMA meant replacing the Soviets with a
new threat. First there was a flirt with China.
Then sprang up the most convenient of enemies -
militant Islam. Cockburn succinctly describes RMA
as "to wage war around the world by remote
control, striking at will at enemies far away who
could be located, identified, and eliminated at
the touch
of a
button, as in a - very expensive - video game" (p
104).
Even with Rumsfeld gone there's no
evidence on which to believe the new paradigm will
be altered - even by reality (NATO in Serbia in
1999 saying it had destroyed more than 100 tanks
when it was only 13; the "air war" in Afghanistan;
the whole debacle in Iraq). RMA is how the
Pentagon will keep organizing future (un)reality.
Cockburn is part of a fine journalistic
family, from his father Claud to brothers Alex
(editor of the Counterpunch website) and Patrick
(a London Independent correspondent and arguably
the most perceptive Western reporter covering the
war in Iraq on the ground). He must have paid
lunch to a legion of insiders to get some of his
tastier tidbits. It goes with the territory. And
it works.
Thus we have a senior White
House official exploding about "a megalomaniac who
has to be in control at all times ... the worst
secretary of defense there has ever been" (p 4). A
former Gerald Ford adviser tells Cockburn that
Rumsfeld "actively undermined arms-control talks
with the USSR. This as much as anything stopped
Ford's election" (p 52). A senior general who had
daily access to Rumsfeld's Pentagon office
describes Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle as
"one of Rumsfeld's principal military advisers" (p
105). And a former White House official describes
vanity incarnate: "The man had to be acknowledged
to be in control. Once people gave him that
acknowledgment, he didn't seem to care" (p 183).
September 11 "made" Rumsfeld. Were it not
for that not-so-simple twist of fate, he might
have been fired for incompetence. Cockburn sums it
all up: "It was as if all those years of political
disappointment - the failed effort to get on the
1976 ticket, the abortive presidential campaign,
the trial balloons for races for governor and
senator that always somehow deflated - had been
wiped away and his dreams of political triumph had
finally and brilliantly come true." Any informed
reader will be familiar with practically
everything Cockburn details from page 119 onward:
Rumsfeld as the public face of Bush's war
presidency, the total information control via
docile embedded reporting, the dismissal of the
looting of Baghdad ("stuff happens"), the denial
of legitimizing torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu
Ghraib.
As a non-embedded foreign
correspondent, I have been on the receiving end of
Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" - in the war theater
of Afghanistan and then Iraq. So I have seen
hubris in action: not his RMA winning the battle
in Afghanistan, as Pentagon spin would have it,
but, in Cockburn's words, "whole provinces ...
changing hands without a shot being fired ...
healthy quantities of US$100 bills distributed by
the CIA to encourage defections by regional
warlords" (p 127). I saw the B-52 ballet in Tora
Bora bombing the wrong side of the mountains - as
Osama bin Laden had already crossed the border to
Pakistan. I saw the kind of "unlawful combatants"
being dragged down to Guantanamo - helpless Afghan
or Pakistani herders caught in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Rumsfeld, of course, always denied
reality - he could never admit that Osama was in
Tora Bora and escaped right under his expensive
satellites' footprint.
In his analysis of
pre-shock and awe, Cockburn stresses the important
point of Richard Perle inviting Ahmad Chalabi to
speak before the Defense Policy Advisory Board -
the de facto private Rumsfeld war think-tank -
just after Princeton University's Bernard Lewis.
The nonagenarian Lewis - a neo-con icon - actually
came up with the original "clash of civilizations"
fallacy. He always maintained that Islamic society
and culture are inherently backward and impervious
to modernization. Cockburn: "Lewis not only
endorsed the liberation of Iraq, but also
confidently asserted that neighboring Arab
countries would support the use of force to bring
this about" (p 150). With distinguished "mentors"
like Lewis, who needs enemies?
Cockburn
also stresses the absurdity of Saddam being
marketed as the supreme nuclear evildoer while
Rumsfeld's team privately knew this was a ragtag
regime - "Special Forces with air support, maybe
just 10,000 or 15,000 troops", enough to bring it
down, according to an insider. "The faith in
technology was boundless," the insider tells
Cockburn (p 153).
So, "as hammered out by
Rumsfeld and [General Tommy] Franks, the Iraq
invasion plans bore the heavy imprint of the
legend of the Afghan war, supposedly won by elite
Special Forces using unconventional tactics to
achieve the same effect as whole divisions" (p
165). Rumsfeld could not have been more
spectacularly wrong. Did he care? Of course not.
It was just a game. Cockburn: "He showed little
interest in what would happen to the country once
the regime had been destroyed" (p 170). Compounded
with what a former Pentagon official tells
Cockburn - "When Rumsfeld got control of postwar
Iraq, [Colin] Powell said, 'Screw them, let the
fuckers stew'" - the endgame was written on the
(desert) wind.
Rumsfeld's steep,
accelerated downfall has been extensively
documented - and Cockburn's narrative does not add
too much on "unknown unknowns". He could have
expanded the crucial point that "few in the
internal American debate seemed to understand that
it was the occupation itself that had ignited
Iraqi resistance" - as there are still very few
American analysts who dare to accept the obvious.
Corporate media have now switched to an "Iraqis
killing Iraqis" mantra, barbaric Arabs killing
Arabs as if the occupation had nothing to do with
it.
No noble mission here. This was a
naked, imperial power grab that went spectacularly
wrong because of a deadly mix of arrogance and
incompetence - hubris redux. Donald Rumsfeld, as
Cockburn mentions at the end, may land a fabulous
book contract to tell "his" truth. He may pepper
the lecture circuit with his pearls of newspeak.
He may enrich the corporate world with his
"government connections". But he will always
remain the hollow man, the stuffed man, head
filled with straw who dreamed he would be king
when he was only a lowly fixer.
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and
Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew Cockburn.
Scribner, New York, 2007. ISBN-13:
978-1-4165-3574-4. Price: US$25, 247 pages.
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