Scorching Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld further stunned the Joint Staff by insisting that he would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zone. Such decisions are known in the military as R.F.F.s�requests for forces. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when and where … Rumsfeld had two goals: to demonstrate the efficacy of precision bombing and to “do the war on the cheap.” … Rumsfeld�s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known … One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. “He was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,” the witness said, “saying, ‘Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?'”

“My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.” And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.” But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.”

“It�s a stalemate now,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers are going to run out of jdams”�the satellite-guided bombs that have been striking targets in Baghdad and elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy. Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. “The Marines are worried as hell,” the former intelligence official went on. “They�re all committed, with no reserves, and they�ve never run the lavs”�light armored vehicles�”as long and as hard” as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. “The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.”

consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

Rumsfeld and co know that amassing an army of quarter of a million is a once-a-decade affair: 1991 and 2003. But if they can prove that victory is possible with a lighter, more nimble force, assembled rapidly – then why not repeat the trick? “This is just the beginning,” an administration official told the New York Times this week. “I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and North Korea as for Iraq.” So Washington may be regretting its hasty shredding of international custom – some of those rules could have come in handy in this war – but the pangs will fade. After all, this is a band of men with big dreams – and work to do.

because this is Mr Rumsfeld’s war not Mr Blair’s, it is Mr Rumsfeld’s purpose that counts. Mr Rumsfeld cares little about the Middle East peace process, less still about giving the UN a central role in Iraq reconstruction, and least of all about a new multilateral world order enforced through global rules applying to all nations including the US. He has worked for this moment for years. He has manoeuvred the administration into the war. He has set its terms and imposed its timetable and he has refused to allow them to be changed or compromised. He is the principal author of the premature and misconceived unilateral invasion which, thanks to Mr Blair’s weakness, has set Britain against international law and diplomacy, wrecked our alliances, convulsed our politics and thrown every part of Labour’s project into doubt. With friends like Mr Rumsfeld, who needs enemies?