This is a tale of two books, each of them slim and each instructive in some fashion as the political new year begins to gather speed for the rush toward an American election day and a popular decision on the Bush administration's conduct of its wars and foreign policies.
Written last summer, before he declared his candidacy for President Bush's job, Wesley Clark's Winning Modern Wars presents a sharply focused critical account of our entanglement in Iraq, in the war and in the even more deadly postwar phase of operations there. Without question, it was Gen. Clark and Gen. Barry McCaffrey whom Vice President Dick Cheney referred to when, last April, he laughed at what he called "retired military officers embedded in TV studios."
They and certainly every other commentator, including myself, had gotten something or some things wrong as Operation Iraqi Freedom unfolded in fits and starts and lightning strikes into the heartland of Saddam Hussein's beleaguered nation. But it would become amply clear that the retired generals and other commentators had no exclusive patent on being wrong when it came to Iraq.
Cheney himself and his good buddy Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were still running victory laps even as a stubborn insurgency neither of them thought possible tied down 130,000 American soldiers. In the balance of the year, the Iraqi malcontents and foreign jihadists killed more American soldiers than were lost in three weeks of actual combat.
Clark writes: "Today many are asking fundamental questions about the war against Saddam, such as whether the operation was justified, whether it has succeeded in reducing the terrorist threat we face, what precisely we are going to do in Iraq -- for how long and at what cost -- and how we should win the broader war against terror." The general adds that these questions about the war need to be answered now, "before the costs and problems associated with our actions have grown so great that change will be seen as failure and continuation will be prohibitively costly."
Clark's hindsight analysis and his reporting on the events of the three-week war are right on target. The general uses unnamed "others" to point the finger at Rumsfeld for micromanaging the deployment of American ground forces. This penchant of Rumsfeld's, and the penny-pinching that went with it, resulted in deploying too small a ground combat force and taking unnecessary risks in the war plan. A second major criticism is of the administration's endgame, which short-changed postwar planning and overlooked how difficult the transition to civilian rule would be for a nation and people subjugated by Saddam Hussein for decades -- a "profound flaw," in Clark's judgment.
In short, the administration (with the exception of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) gave little or no thought to what happens when the destruction of war ends and the serious task of securing the peace and rebuilding a shattered nation begins. Rumsfeld and his neoconservative aides, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, didn't believe there would be a real problem, didn't believe in nation-building and thus did not plan for it.
As for all that noise about Rumsfeld's revolutionary transformation of the military, radical rewriting of Clausewitzian principles and birthing of a new way of war, Clark says this "is largely a reality . . . inherited when [Bush officials] took office in 2001."
There are changes needed, and changes afoot, in the Army. But Rumsfeld owes the simple existence of an Army still barely large enough to handle unending commitments old and new -- in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Korea, the Sinai and elsewhere -- to then-Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki's successfully fending off a Rumsfeld attempt in 2001 to cut the active-duty Army from 10 divisions to eight, and the Army National Guard from eight divisions to four. In the first part of 2001, the office of the secretary of defense firmly believed that the United States was beginning a 20-year strategic pause, a welcome breathing space that could be used to transform (read: downsize) the Army and gain billions in savings on personnel that then would be spent building a strategic missile defense.
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, made it clear there would be no pause, and made it just as clear that the Army needed every soldier it had, active and reserve and National Guard, to deal with what was coming. Far from excoriating Shinseki, Rumsfeld should have been grateful that the general saved him from himself.
As Iraq ate up our deployable military might and consumed an estimated $100 billion per year of our national budget, what of the global war on terror? Clark says, "the analysis suggests that defeating terrorism is more difficult and far-reaching than we have assumed. Not only does the struggle continue; our success is far from assured."
Yet that hasn't tempered the ambitions of the Bush White House. Clark asserts: "Overnight [after Sept. 11], U.S. foreign policy became not only unilateralist but moralistic, intensely patriotic, and assertive, planning military action against Iraq and perhaps other states in the Middle East, and intimating the New American Empire." He clearly believes we have gone in the wrong direction and has been stumping the country saying so.
And here we consider, briefly as deserved, Midge Decter's hagiography of her friend of two decades' standing, Donald Rumsfeld. The best that can be said of Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait is that it is mercifully short.
Decter has been described as the doyenne of the neoconservative movement: wife of one of its founders, Norman Podhoretz; mother of a key adherent, John Podhoretz; and an in-law of the White House's Middle East expert Elliott Abrams. Like other neoconservatives, she has made a long leap from left to right, landing lightly at the end just as dogmatically certain of rectitude as before. The neocons, by virtue of that background, are obviously more witty and literate than the plain old cons.
Not that Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait displays much in the way of wit or erudition. Consider page one of the prelude: "It was a warm autumn evening in 2001, and we were dining alfresco on a terrace overlooking New York's Central Park. A woman I had known for many years -- a handsome, elegant and well-connected member of the city's cultural and artistic community -- was seated across from me. 'Oh, Rumsfeld,' she practically cooed, 'I just love the man! To tell you the truth, I have his picture hanging in my dressing room.' "
Or this, on page two, same prelude: "I had been very pleased then, as one would be in the case of someone one knows and respects, when after more than a quarter of a century [Rumsfeld] had been returned to a high position in the United States government. But for him to be the object of so very feminine a kind of admiration was something altogether different. This was the stuff -- no other word would do -- of glamour."
Or this, at the end of the book: "And then there is his stardom, which has carried with it, and to some extent furthered, some kind of change in American attitudes. The popular 'discovery' of Donald H. Rumsfeld spells the return of the ideal of the Middle American family man, with all that such an ideal entails in the way of vitality, determination, humor, seriousness, and abiding self-confidence, along with protectiveness toward loved ones, neighbors, and country."
That is a debatable point, to put it mildly, given the harsh reception accorded those Rumsfeldian American ideals in Iraq and among our traditional allies in Western Europe (especially those Rumsfeld has humorously dismissed as "Old Europe"). Rumsfeld would do well to buy up every copy of this book he can locate to prevent any wider circulation.
Reviewed by Joseph L. Galloway
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
