The Undertaker’s
Tally
As he leaves
the Pentagon and American foreign policy in unprecedented ruin, it is the reckoning
on a long, portentous history that went typically unheeded
By Roger Morris
—Vice President Dick Cheney
On a farewell flight to
2006, the departing Secretary of Defense reminisced about his start in politics
more than forty years before. Aides leaned
in to listen intently but came away with no memorable revelations. It hardly matters. As usual with this man who dominated government
as no cabinet officer before him—including the power-ravenous Henry Kissinger
he so despised and outdid in effect if not celebrity—authentic history and Don Rumsfeld’s
version bear little resemblance.
There
was portent in those beginnings, much of the past predictable when it started,
after all. He came out of an affluent
at 1950s
another future Defense Secretary of mediocre mind yet the iron conceit and
shrewd fealty far more effectual in government than intellect or sensibility. After college and two years of ROTC duty as a
Navy pilot, Rumsfeld did politic stints as a Capitol Hill intern and Republican
campaign aide, and by twenty-nine, back in
for Congress. As with much to come, a
darker thread lay beneath the surface from the start. In a Republican primary tantamount to
election, he was outwardly the boyish, speak-no-evil under-funded underdog
challenger of the old party stalwart set to inherit the open seat. Inside, he was generously financed by wealthy
friends, while his operatives—including Jeb Stuart Magruder of later Watergate
infamy—furtively harried and smeared the opponent with tactics never traced to
Rumsfeld.
He went to
safe-seat tribune from the
of
Illinois one of the wealthiest in the nation and smoothly in Republican grip
for most of a century. In the House
Rumsfeld was soon seen by some as he always saw himself—a prodigy amid his
party’s duller ranks. Then as afterward he had no authentic
distinction of qualification or independent achievement. But that was always masked by the same
muscular aggressive style he took onto the mat as an Ivy League wrestler—“sharp
elbows,” a meeker, envious colleague called it—and not least by the flaccid banality
of most of the 1960s GOP, thrashing between the wasting death of Eisenhower worldliness
and moderation, Richard Nixon’s haunted succession, and the fitful but enveloping
right-wing seizure that in little more than a decade would deliver the Reagan
Reaction.
Rumsfeld’s own rightist
mentality merged with currents little gauged at the time. His New Deal-phobic corporatist cant and Cold
War chauvinism came dressed more in modish vigor than telltale substance, in
particular his typical, tough-minded layman’s zeal for the era’s pre-micro
processing but grandly prospering military technology. Like most of his generation born in the early
1930s, the scrap-drive, victory bond children of World War II who came to
govern much of the postwar and became decisive elders of the post-9/11 era, he
had no doubt of the natural nobility of America’s sway or the matching
invincibility of its arms, made ever sleeker and more irresistible by the
demonstrable twin deities of American capitalism—technology and “modern” management. That, after all, was the unquestioned,
unquestioning faith of
nation, the world according to postwar Princeton as well as
duly quantified Ford Motor Company, his Vietnam War Pentagon in train, and so
much more.
For the early
1960s as later, that received world ended just beyond suites and suburbs. Given America’s moral and material omnipotence,
its exemplary excellence so evident on the North Shore, the remainder of the
planet required no particular exploration or knowledge, much less depth of
historical-political understanding, a recognition of America’s own
non-mythologized past or of any other—certainly not for ready decision-makers
busy with the numbered bottom-line results.
As money or force need be applied to Asians, Arabs, Latins, Africans, a crisp
briefing by some underling who read the memos would always do. Caught up in Rumsfeld’s kinetic, soon churlish
descent into the bloody chaos of his Iraq, it has been easy to neglect how
richly cultural it all was from the
beginning, America’s terrible half-century symmetry of vast might and presumption
beside still vaster ignorance and irresponsibility. It was
in 1963, during Don Rumsfeld’s first months in Congress, that the Iraqi Ba’ath—trailing
a twenty-six-year-old Tikriti street thug named Saddam Hussein, and the party since
1959 recruited, funded, marshaled and meticulously directed by the CIA, replete
with killing lists of hundreds of left-leaning Iraqi political figures and
professionals to be murdered after the coup—seized power in Baghdad.
Back on Capitol
Hill, the spirited young Republican legislator was absorbed in exhilarating new
appropriations in aeronautics and weaponry.
His trademark clipped fervor and biting sarcasm in questions and
speeches held a hint of Pentagon E Ring canon four decades later—the superpower
military as classic wrestler, lithe, quick, superbly equipped, swift to pin a
dazed foe, prowess and dominance beyond doubt, garlands all around. It was only a matter, he began to learn early
from helpful briefings and testimony by military-industrial executives, of
making the commanders (the branch managers, after all) adapt and adopt, change
their sluggish old ways, procure to prevail.
So superior was new technology and management that the opponent or arena,
competitor or market, scarcely counted. In
stock
colloquies before empty chambers, there were the first faint drums of distant
disaster in the Hindu Kush,
more.
Rumsfeld’s ardor
for a high-tech military was only stirring in the 1960s. It was a vague, minor dalliance beside his
original and lasting preoccupation with advance. While again few seemed to notice, the brash freshman
made an extraordinary rush at the lumbering House. Before the end of his
first term, he captained a revolt in 1964 against GOP Leader Charles Halleck,
an Eisenhower loyalist prone to bipartisanship and skepticism of both Pentagon budgets
and foreign intervention. By only six
votes in the Republican Caucus, Rumsfeld managed the replacement of the folksy
Indianan with
Gerald Ford. In the inner politics of
the House, the likeable, agreeable, unoriginal Ford was always more right-wing
than his benign post-Nixon and now posthumous presidential image would have it,
and in any case, as Nixon called him, “a wink and a nod guy” whose artlessness
and integrity left him no real match for the steelier and more cunning. To push Ford was one of those darting inside
moves on Capitol Hill that seem at the time to win limited, parochial prizes—choice
committee seats, a rung on the leadership ladder, useful allies. Taken with Rumsfeld’s burly style in 1964,
for instance, was Kansas Congressman Robert Ellsworth, a wheatfield small town lawyer
of decidedly modest gifts but outsized ambition and close connections to Nixon. “Just another Young Turk thing,” one of their
cohorts casually called the toppling of Halleck.
It seems hard now
to exaggerate the sequels. The lifting
of the honest but mediocre Ford higher into line for appointment as Vice
President amid the Nixon-Agnew ruin;
Ford’s lackluster if relatively harmless interval in the Oval Office and later
as party leader with the abject passing of the GOP to Reagan in 1980; meanwhile Ellsworth’s boosting of Rumsfeld
into prominent but scandal-immune posts under Nixon; then on Ford’s presidency Rumsfeld trusted and rewarded with
elevation to White House Chief of Staff and with him the rise of one of his
aides from the Nixon era, an otherwise unheard of young Wyoming reactionary
named Dick Cheney; in 1975-1976 the
first Rumsfeld tenure at a Vietnam-disgraced but impenitent Pentagon that would
shape his fateful second term after 2001;
and eventually, of course, the Rumsfeld-Cheney monopoly of power with George W.
Bush, their catastrophic policies after 9/11 and the resulting wars and crises—all
followed from making decent diffident Gerry Ford Minority Leader that forgotten
winter of 1964.
They were Nixon
men. In national launch if not ideology,
Rumsfeld and Cheney rose by the half-shunned political paternity in which a
cynical president abided some he distrusted, even came to deplore, yet thought
to use. Come to the 1968 Nixon campaign
by Ellsworth’s influence, Rumsfeld fell into an opportune role—spying on the
Democratic Convention in Chicago, which exploded in the infamous “police riot”
against antiwar demonstrators that tore apart the Democrats and lent the spy’s
reports unexpected gravity. (Among faces
in the crowd watching the mayhem was another onlooker out of a comfortable
Republican suburb, a twenty-one-year-old
student from
named Hillary Rodham.) Even with attention
gained in the Democrats’ disaster, however, Rumsfeld flinted against the Nixon’s
equally barbed campaign manager, Bob Haldeman, and despite their election victory
he returned to Congress at the start of 1969 without the expected spoils of
some ranking Administration job.
As often in these
stories, bipartisan collusion rescued him.
By 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the once
heralded antipoverty program with its grass roots “Community Action” and
especially its Legal Services for the poor, had become after only four rocky years
a potential success, and thus anathema for powerful Democrats as well as
Republicans. Denied by the tobacco lobby
a 1964 cigarette tax that would have funded it securely, then starved by the
sinking of resources into the Vietnam maw, OEO was ultimately doomed when the
nascent political, economic and legal assertiveness it nurtured among the thirty
to fifty million dispossessed threatened the hold of vested-interest donors and
the mingled power bases of governors and mayors, congressmen and legislators of
both parties, urban and rural, across the nation. As early as 1966 they trooped in their
numbers through the
uniformly self-preserving, the single party of incumbent power—to lobby Vice
President Hubert Humphrey, who warned Johnson against the damaging political
defections as
escalated, and who planned to cut the program as president himself. OEO’s death was certain with Nixon, though
thought to require as director a tough infighter against the agency’s vestige life
support. Nixon first ignored the
appointment, but then later in 1969, at the urging of ranking Senate Democrats
as well as Ford and Ellsworth, named Rumsfeld, who chose as deputy his
Princeton pal Carlucci, off a buccaneering start with the Foreign Service and
CIA coups and assassinations in the early 1960s Congo. The writ was plain. On Capitol Hill, they called Rumsfeld “the
undertaker.”
So it was that a slight,
already balding twenty-eight-year-old Republican Congressional intern soon steered
to the new OEO Director a twelve-page memo setting out how to run the agency to
kill what they all deplored. Richard
Bruce Cheney was less than prodigal himself at this point. Failing at Yale and returning to his native
in
internship to avoid the
draft and satisfy his ambitious fiancée
as well to retrieve a white collar career.
Like so many in the neo-conservative swarm he came to head after 2001,
Cheney brought to public life no intellectual distinction or curiosity, and
least of all knowledge of the wider nation and world. Moving to
came to live in a town of more than 200,000.
But overlaying his glacial insularity was a reassuring phlegmatic
manner, in
a found instinct for the quiet, diligent subordinate’s exploitation of
institutional indolence and evasion to derive his own power, and not least a
clenched-teeth right-wing animus that less sonorous, self-effacing Republicans
judged impolitic for themselves but impressively stiffening and affirming in a
backroom staff man. “Dick said what they
all thought but didn’t say aloud,” a Hill aide and later Congressman recalled
of often raw conversations about money, race, partisanship, and particularly
Cheney’s angry, acid scorn for college antiwar protests. Having earlier rejected him as a House intern,
Rumsfeld now made the young right-winger his key personal assistant at OEO, where
he proved devotedly efficient. (It was
another premonitory touch: three
future Secretaries of Defense, Rumsfeld, Carlucci and Cheney, all in the same
office toiling to abort the unwanted embryonic empowerment of the poor.)
When they became
celebrities, there would be much written about the meshed styles of Rumsfeld
and Cheney—Rummy relishing combat and limelight, free-wheeling, sparking ideas
and decisions helter-skelter (show and such sheer brio, famously dropping to
the floor for one-arm push-ups, that a bureaucrat-benumbed Washington media
always found fetching, with actual substance easily overlooked), in contrast to
steady backroom Dick the methodical organizer, a modest detail man seeing to
practical execution. Close up, the bond was
more. Across the distance between
charged and calm, almost a decade’s age difference, North Shore and Casper,
Princeton and Wyoming, country club Congressman and lumpen proletariat repairman,
they shared what was widespread on the right if rarely admitted so openly as
they each did in their distinct idioms: Abhorrence of the liberations sweeping
the 1960s, not alone or even mainly the right’s pet scourges of bureaucracy,
crime, drugs, social fragmentation and (suitably coded) racial integration, but
the unsettling ferment of newfound freedom and honesty for individuals and families
as well as neighborhoods, businesses and campuses, the defiance of cultural and
institutional oppressions, especially by minorities and women, the Johnson
Great Society’s apparent advance beyond the New Deal and Progressivism at the
expense of settled money and power. Altogether
it was a moment of hurtling change many saw as ominous weakness and laxity, public
programs for the long-excluded as “socialism” and balancing regulation of
long-dominant business power as “tyranny,” menacing new arrangements of race
and class, the myriad threats of sheer liberty in a more equitable society and
economy. Whatever their other ties,
Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the era’s visceral Reactionaries in the classic
sense of the term. Musing with younger aides
on one of his last days in the White House, and despite the toll taken by some
of the same forces on his own broken presidency, Johnson had a telling term for
the wider ilk. “The haters,” he called
them. “They hate what they can’t run any
more.” The calamity Rumsfeld and Cheney
later wrought in American foreign policy traced not only to profound ignorance
and immense, careless pretense about the world at large, but in some part to a
kindred fear and loathing at home four decades before.
OEO
began the Rumsfeld myths. “He saved it,”
Carlucci would blithely tell oblivious post-9/11 reporters hardly apt to check
the actual fate of the agency, spinning an image of an ever-energetic Rumsfeld
taking up the cause of his constituency of the needy, streamlining and
fortifying despite the funeral order. It
was a blasé postmortem lie. Community
Action, Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, most decisively Legal Services whose leadership
Rumsfeld and Cheney stood together to decapitate in 1970—one by one the beleaguered
efforts were stifled or sloughed off to political sterility under some foster
bureaucracy, this mission, at least, accomplished. By the time burial was complete with the
agency’s quiet extinction in 1973, unmourned by the base powers of either
party, the undertaker had moved on to higher office.
Two years before,
Nixon had planned to use Rumsfeld in a cabinet shakeup, but when that was
stymied, took him into the White House as a domestic affairs “counselor.” The
interval 1971-1973 is captured on Nixon tapes in which the sixty-year-old
president adopts an avuncular tone with his ever-aggressive if not sometimes megalomaniacal
forty-year-old aide. Rumsfeld angles brazenly to supplant Henry Kissinger as a
special envoy on
or even to replace the yet pre-scandal Spiro Agnew as vice president on the
1972 ticket. Patiently yet with audible derision
and occasional incredulity, Nixon suggests seasoning in more modest positions. Thus, after the 1972 reelection, eager Rummy
would be made Ambassador to NATO, spoils before handed to their mutual friend
Ellsworth, who again urged Rumsfeld for the job. It all yielded more myths, more confected
history by submissive uninformed media profiling post-9/11 power. There would be Rumsfeld as White House “dove”
on
when his bent was exactly the opposite.
Or Nixon said to see him as the only stand-for-election tested politician
among his advisors, and thus uniquely in touch with the diversity of the country,
especially the young—when the reality was Rumsfeld’s impatient three terms from
his lavishly unrepresentative rotten borough of Winnetka wealth, his generic contempt
for the 1960s, his part at OEO in suppressing the emergence of millions of the
young poor, even his undercutting backstairs at the White House of Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s Nixon Administration initiative for welfare reform and a
guaranteed income. At the time, the
actual shallowness and grasping led to withering verdicts from knowing witnesses. Even a jaded Nixon came to deplore him as “a
man without idealism.” Experience with despots giving the judgment added weight,
Kissinger thought Rumsfeld as an official the “most ruthless” he had ever
known.
In a
routinely hides its ugly inner truths of character and incompetence like
surgeons closing over a malignancy they discreetly keep to themselves lest it
alarm the customers, none of it mattered.
Away at NATO in Brussels, frustrated by multi-national diplomacy but furthering
his own sense of his political-military mastery, Rumsfeld escaped the Watergate
incriminations of 1973-74 that might well have ensnared him had he still been
at the White House, drawn into the cover-up by his often irrepressible
partisanship and combativeness, conceivably crushed like Haldeman, John Erlichman
and others. Instead, he seemed fresh and apart when Ford succeeded
Nixon in August 1974. Anxious to be rid
of Nixon co-conspirators like Alexander Haig but facing rule with inadequate
crony aides, the earnest new president called back clean, hard-charging Don to
be chief of staff. Rumsfeld brought in
Cheney, who after OEO was on his way to vanishing mercifully into private
business—and the rest, as the culture of governance would have it, is history.
Barely a year
after moving next to the Oval Office, (and contrary to Ford’s typically
innocent, prideful recollection decades later that it was all his own idea) they
characteristically engineered their “Halloween Massacre,” subtly, persistently exploiting
Ford’s unease (and Kissinger’s jealous rivalry) with cerebral, acerbic Defense
Secretary James Schlesinger to pass to Rumsfeld the Pentagon at only
forty-three, and make Cheney his successor as a wunderkind thirty-four year-old presidential Chief of Staff. Prodigies by ferocious, sly self-promotion,
in the process they also maneuvered Ford to humble Kissinger, and so further enhance
their own new provinces of power, by stripping him of his long-held dual role
as National Security Advisor. (Super K,
as an adoring supine media called him, a master schemer himself, was so stunned
by the Rumsfeld-Cheney coup that he called an after-hours séance of cronies at
a safe house in Chevy Chase to plot for days his petulant resignation, only to
relent, overcome as usual by the majesty of his gifts, if only a foreign
minister.) With such past trophies, it
was never a contest for Rumsfeld and Cheney after 2001. That fall of 1975, twenty-nine year-old
George W. Bush, the lineage’s least fortunate son, was in Midland, Texas,
partying heartily and scrounging for some role on the rusty panhandle fringes
of the oil business.
Their purge served
grandiose ambition. By December 1975
having pushed aside as well Watergate-appointed vice-president Nelson
Rockefeller, the longtime abomination of the Republican right, Rumsfeld was
positioning from the cabinet to be Ford’s 1976 running mate and eventual
successor. But then that spring Reagan
came so close to wresting the nomination with primary victories in
that the President’s other advisors, many of whom detested Rumsfeld, sprang
typically to appease the Reagan camp by persuading Ford to put choleric
right-wing Kansas Senator Bob Dole on the ticket instead. Among them were George H.W. Bush, then-CIA Director
(a job he got at Rumsfeld’s cynical recommendation, calculating that to put
Bush at the then scandal-ridden agency would eliminate him as a potential rival),
and Bush’s own onetime Texas campaign aide, a moneyed corporate lawyer and would-be
power-broker from Houston, the obscure Commerce Department official who became
Ford’s the 1976 campaign manager, James Baker III. It was an adroit back corridor move, the sort
Rumsfeld himself practiced so adeptly, and it embittered him for years toward
his old patron Ford as well as Bush, Baker and others—one more wisp of a seamy unseen
history, more customary Republican cannibalism, wafting ironically over the
last days of 2006 with the Iraq Study Group and the Ford Funeral.
II
Designs on the
Oval Office thwarted but by no means given up, Rumsfeld’s scarcely fifteen
months at the Pentagon in 1975-1976 were quietly, ominously historic. It was an interval far more significant and
premonitory than commonly portrayed in the usual shallow coverage then and later,
in many ways a foreshadowing and preparation of the fateful sequel after
9/11. At every turn the new SecDef
pulled policy to the right— aligning Washington even more egregiously than
usual with reactionary regimes in Asia and Latin America, smothering the
nation’s only serious intelligence reform, beginning the demolition of détente
with Russia that would climax in its extinction under Jimmy Carter, at home and
abroad seeding the Middle East for future crises, and, in some ways most
insidious, joining the military leadership to desert cravenly the post-Vietnam battlefield
of historical understanding and institutional change.
Over his first
days in office, he allied decisively with the Joint Chiefs’ longtime but until
then vain efforts to stall the pending strategic arms control agreement with
Moscow, his first blow in its eventual killing.
He also pushed Kissinger and Ford (one of the more disgraceful acts of
the Ford presidency discreetly ignored in the recent retrospectives) in
assuring the Indonesian military junta of continued
support and arms in the brutal suppression about to be unleashed in December
1975 on
preference for uniformed right-wing tyrants, indulged over the next year in an
ever closer Defense Department liaison with military dictatorships in Latin
America, particularly in Argentina and Pinochet’s
Chile, most notably through their Operation
Condor, joint covert actions involving several regimes, with Pentagon attaches
and intelligence advisors looking on, that resulted in kidnappings and
assassinations throughout the Hemisphere, including the brazen car bomb murder
of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague
on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Washington in 1976. Unfailingly urged and expanded by Rumsfeld, the
collusion with Indonesian and Latin American despots underwrote more than a
decade of some of the most savage repressions of the second half of the twentieth
century.
Part of the customary
Pentagon-State Department bureaucratic war Rumsfeld waged against Kissinger (now
with added vengeance fired by the Defense Secretary’s presidential ambition) was
a furtive alliance with Capitol Hill’s ubër-hard-line Democrat, Armed Service
Committee Chairman and Kissinger nemesis Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Washington
state’s backwoods shoreline county prosecutor become senator from Boeing. Jackson’s Russophobia, demagoguery on arms
control, and zealous backing of Israel, especially on the then-charged issue of
Jewish emigration from the USSR —cold war politics engorging military budgets
and Puget Sound contracts along with the senator’s war chest for a 1976 presidential
run, all fomented by an pretentious, pear-shaped Jackson aide named Richard
Perle— put Rumsfeld deep in the milieu of the Israeli Lobby, already formidable
if only a kernel of the special interest colossus it became on behalf of an
alien power. The collusion introduced
him to some of the still marginal, relentlessly mediocre publicists, ideologues
and
term neo-conservative for their career-plumping chauvinism and, less audibly,
their tragically intermingled allegiance to the right wings of the
In Rumsfeld’s
early tie to that wanna-be-establishment claque were omens of the history they
would make together after 2001. It was
his “sharp elbows” that made for the creation of the notorious “Team B,” the
collection of incipient neo-cons and Russophobes in and out of government,
including Paul Wolfowitz, who were summoned to pose an analysis of Soviet
capabilities and intentions as an alternative to comparatively unfrightening
(and accurate) CIA assessments being attacked by Reagan and his right-wing
minions in the 1976 campaign. Surrender
to the election-year demagoguery traced to the White House and the elder Bush
at the CIA (more Ford regime shame politely forgotten at the mournful,
anyone-compared-to-George W. end of 2006), but Rumsfeld’s role was crucial, and
the consequences historic. In numbers
and impact it was the first neo-con and Israeli lobby wedge into the inner
reaches of intelligence and decision-making, a portent of their blanketing
presence in 2001, and while the absurdity and ideological corruption of their
“analysis” of the Russian bogeyman (along with their expected confrontation
with China, nakedly racist, essentially Israeli view of the Arab world and
refusal to face the Vietnam defeat) would be plain even then—only to be exposed
as all the greater fraud by post-Soviet archives—their animus fed the fear and
resulting massive arms buildup of the Reagan 80s, and with it the
military-industrial colossus whose political hold left the American war machine
and its distortions in domestic priorities so largely in tact in the post-cold
war, ready for Rumsfeld’s return to power.
The “Team B”
scandal foreshadowed as well one of the most insidious of the post-9/11
plagues, the right-wing assault on relatively non-ideological national
intelligence that was to lead in the mongering of the Iraq war to the blatant
substitution of alternative “intelligence” operations in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon
and Cheney’s Vice-presidential office (full-time versions of “Team B,” as it
were), as well as the coercion and corruption of conventional CIA
channels. While in 1976 he worked to
undercut any intelligence that challenged his right-wing bias—and again much as
he would repeat after 9/11 in sanctioning unprecedented and effectively
unaccountable intelligence operations and imprisonments both military and
civilian—Rumsfeld (along with Cheney more tracklessly at the White House) was
also the Ford Administration’s most powerful inner force fighting off
meaningful intelligence reforms after shocking revelations of CIA covert
operations abuses in the mid-1970s hearings chaired by Senator Frank Church and
Congressman Otis Pike. The resulting
half-measures and truncated accountability, sending the unmistakable signals of
thwarted reform throughout Washington, set the stage for the CIA’s rampaging
1980s under Reagan campaign manager William Casey (and one of Casey’s
ambitious, agreeable aides named Robert Gates), with direct consequences once
again in blowback and loss of professional integrity for decades to come.
Then, not least,
there was the
Lebanese nationalist coalition to challenge the traditional privileged rule of
the West’s Christian-dominated client regime in
in secret US-Israeli instigation of a Syrian military intervention to thwart
both the Palestinians and Lebanese rebels. His muscling of the covert action over
Kissinger’s initial hesitation followed long-collaborative intrigue in the
well as the CIA. It ushered in three decades
of Syrian occupation in Lebanon, with relentless Mossad-US machinations, the
eventual rise of Hizbullah, and altogether fateful results for the Lebanese and
for the very US and Israeli interests the 1976 Syrian invasion was recklessly
plotted to serve.
At the same time, Rumsfeld
avidly stepped up ongoing
arms shipments to the Shah of Iran, whose corrupt U.S.-installed oligarchic
tyranny—its torture-ready SAVAK secret police intimately allied with Mossad, the
CIA and DIA—would fall to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution scarcely
two years later, in part under the sheer weight and waste of the Pentagon’s
huge patronage. At its peak with
Rumsfeld in 1976,
weapons and intelligence trafficking with the rotting imperial regime occupied some
eight hundred Pentagon officers. Like CIA-DIA
connivance with SAVAK—which included coordinated assassinations of Iranian
opposition political figures or clerics and even Khomeini’s son—wider Pentagon complicity
with the hated old order made all but inevitable the widespread anti-American sentiment
in Iran exploited by the Islamic regime’s propaganda. Detonating in the 1979 seizure of
it was popular hostility, like so much in the
that burned out of a history of intervention and intrigue few Americans ever
knew.
Over 1976 Rumsfeld
also pressed the sale to the waning Shah of up to eight nuclear reactors with
fuel and lasers capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade. Ford was prudently uneasy at first, but
relented under unanimous pressure from his men.
Cheney backed Rumsfeld from the start in urging an Iranian nuclear
capability. And in this at least they
were joined by their arch rival Kissinger, ever solicitous of his admirer the
Shah, ever oblivious to internal Islamic politics, and now primed himself by an
obscure but vocal thirty-three-year-old State Department aide named Wolfowitz. (With
story to be told elsewhere, but Rumsfeld and others, including Gates at the CIA,
were all in a sense policy godfathers of Hizbullah, and the mullahs’ regime in
Even more costly
than these forays into geo-politics, however, was the toll deep inside the
American military. However brief, Rumsfeld’s
rule at the Pentagon in the mid-1970s was in some respects the most crucial since
World War II. In seven tumultuous years
from Johnson’s fall to Nixon’s, spanned by defeat and de facto mutiny in
Vietnam, four secretaries trooped through Defense, each consumed by war or politics, none engaging the institution’s historic
plight. Taking office six months after
the fall of
first truly post-Vietnam military. Fittingly,
the crisis he thus faced had come full-blown over the two decades of his adult
life since the 1950s. By 1975-1976, for
anyone serious about the military and national defense, that crisis was
extensively studied and documented as well as there for the hearing or asking
from top to bottom in any Pentagon ring, any post at home or abroad as well as
in Congress, the Executive, press and public—unmistakable in the searing
experiences of a war whose dark-soil graves at nearby Arlington were still
fresh. By any measure it was a rare, fleeting
moment when the enormous
war machine might have come to terms with its past and thus the future. The failure—hardly Rumsfeld’s alone but his
role decisive—would haunt
and the world into the twenty-first century.
their first unwon war in
Douglas MacArthur had written a congressman in the letter that finally prodded
President Harry Truman to fire him in 1951. The services promptly found one nonetheless in
the warm bath of a careerist managerial ethic.
Ruled in the world wars by a multiplying bureaucracy (and
correspondingly inhospitable to the officer as individual), America’s superpower
military was already by 1950 a sclerotic giant—“a glandular thing,” as then-Secretary
of Defense Robert Lovett described it a decade later to John Kennedy. The brutal Korean stalemate, following on the
early rout of a billet-flabby occupation army from
and then the frozen bloody retreat from the heedless conquest of
pressed to the Chinese border, added to the curse. Vaguely yet suddenly unsure of itself in the
ambiguous, demanding politics of a cold war nuclear-armed peace, a supposedly
matchless force that had met its match in the murky realm of political
sophistication as well as on the battlefield, the profession grappled to redefine
and reassure its place. But over the
1950s, that grasping only produced a preponderance of what one critic called
the “formlessly ambitious” officer, seeing the service and climbing it as any
other corporate culture. To a blight Charles
de Gaulle once deplored in his French Army as “solely careerism.” the post-Korea
U.S. military added the fetish and pseudoscience of “management,” warriors
astride desks, commanding paper flow and flourishing the numerology of budgets
and ever-more expensive weapons systems (the polished, suitably camouflaged
versions of which won over Rumsfeld and others like him on the Hill).
Procurement plunder
and corruption, the venal revolving door between senior officers and
contractors, the inveterate lack of authentic accounting and accountability at
almost every level—all the old Pentagon scourges were rampant. The toll of the new ethic in lost integrity
and intellect left each of them more unchecked than ever, and would be
disastrous in the services at large. The
good staff life rather than active command, “ticket punching,” the right job at
the right time, fostered an officer corps overwhelmingly pursuing rank as an end
itself, at pains to do no more than what one embittered combat colonel recalled
as a “a necessary but minimal amount of field duty.” As credentials merely accumulated and efficiency
reports grew inflated and meaningless, there was the inevitable atrophy of both
ethics and the military art. Most of
all, management itself, the faith and practice of the new creed, was the first
casualty of institutional shallowness and self-protection. Winners emerged compromised and cynical,
losers alienated and contemptuous of superiors, with general morale, credible command
authority and old-fashioned élan and esprit de corps decimated in any
case. Graduates and non-graduates alike
trained their disillusion on institutions like
which they privately mocked by the early 1960s as the South Hudson Institute of
Technology—SHIT. To many, the Academy’s
sacred “Duty, honor, country” now seemed eclipsed in practice by the mammoth
organization’s immutable rule of survival: Cover your ass.
All the more vital
with the need to understand the history and politics of vast new arenas of
American policy—regions of potential military embroilment in Asia, the Middle
East and elsewhere—once-elite service graduate schools like the War Colleges
became pro forma, sinking to what a study found the “usually superficial and
vapid.” There would be no
twentieth-century American Clausewitz, wrote Ward Just, the best of the era’s
military affairs journalists surveying the wreckage of a defense establishment so
driven by the corporate inanity, “because the writing of Von Krieg (On War) took time and serious thought.” Much of this bureaucratic decadence overtook
other arms of government in the 1950s, not least a State Department where
effects were similar and introspection and honesty afterward less open than in
the armed services. As
intellectual vacuum and command mediocrity in a military—whose business,
reminded everyone, is sometimes to fight wars—would be catastrophic. Within the system, there were predictable if
vain attempts to hide the enveloping disgrace.
When a war-college study of “professionalism” in
implications, as a pair of reviewing experts described it, “devastating to the
officer corps,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, beneficiaries of the breakdown, quickly
classified and suppressed the findings.
Yet none of the inner withering was a secret, or even arcane knowledge
in government Before, during and after Rumsfeld’s first
regime at the Pentagon, Congressional hearings, journalism and memoirs exposed the
reality, while nationally noted, amply documented books, often written by
veteran officers or based on their testimony, appeared under titles eloquent of
the disaster—Crisis in Command:
Mismanagement in the Army, Defeated: Inside America’s Military Machine,
Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Military,
The Death of the Army.
death literal. Ironically, there had
been a portent—and if carefully read, a warning—of the debacle ahead in
Southeast Asia (and thirty years later in Iraq and Afghanistan, for that
matter) in a book discussed in Washington to the point of fad as Rumsfeld began
his political career in the early 1960s.
General Maxwell Taylor was a handsome, much-decorated World War II airborne
hero, a Missouri country boy become reputed military intellectual, albeit given
to the pandemic provincialism yet gall of postwar American officialdom, whose nation’s
new world power so outstripped its knowledge of the plant. Taylor unabashedly extolling the Shah’s
repressive Iranian troops as among the “armies of freedom,” and instructed a
West Point class on the eve of Vietnam that they were entering a world in which
“the ascendancy of American arms and American military concepts is accepted as
[a] matter of course.” But he also
proposed to correct the errors of the 1950s strategic doctrine of “massive
retaliation,”—and not incidentally rescue his beloved army from the budget
predations of the Air Force—by a new orthodoxy of “limited wars” fought with a
“strategy of flexible response.”
defined his breakthrough in a celebrated book, Uncertain Trumpet, as “the need for a capability to react across the
entire spectrum of possible challenge for coping with anything from general
atomic war to infiltration and aggressions…”
(In what some will note as the numbing lack of originality (as apart
from packaging) in military theorizing, any similarity between Taylor’s notion
and “flexibility” in the hybrid Soviet General Staff-Pentagon “Revolution in
Military Affairs” Rumsfeld famously adopted in 2001 would be striking, and, of
course, not coincidental.)
On whether the
could practically or should politically as a matter of national interest cope
“with anything,” the confident paratrooper Taylor, with scant knowledge of the
world at large, wisely did not elaborate.
His point, after all, was “capability,” meaning a bigger, better army
with bigger better budgets. Properly selected “limited wars,” with
newly created forces chafing to be used, would presumably take care of themselves. But even with the “flexible” and “limited,”
necessary “to deter or win quickly,” dictating an overwhelming application of
men and weaponry and swift, decisive victory everyone, including the defeated enemy,
could agree on. “Otherwise.” he noted ominously
in a passage the general as well as his admirers tended to overlook, “the
limited war which we cannot win quickly may result in our piecemeal attrition.”
theme, minus this gloomy caveat, enjoyed swift vogue in the early 1960s with
both Republicans and Democrats generally uninformed but anxious about, and
eager to engage, what were seen as ubiquitous Russians and native communists
scavenging post-colonial turmoil in the
impatient with the aged caution of their own party’s Eisenhower or Halleck, and
chief among the Democrats President John F. Kennedy who promptly enlisted
Asia
careerism still too close to be seen clearly, the military thus readied, under
the misbegotten charge of policy-makers civilian and military (again omens of
Iraq and Afghanistan), to fight in reassuring theory what in the reality of
Vietnam would be Maxwell Taylor’s oxymoronic nightmare—a limited war of
attrition.
That war, of
course, had its men of courage and integrity, though more than ever as
exceptions to the prevailing system, and seldom as intact survivors to highest
rank in the twenty-first century. The machinery
that in peacetime routinely ground out rhapsodic officer efficiency reports and
remained oblivious to its corporatist decline instantly applied the same
practiced reflexes to the surreal paper work of Saigon and its offshore carrier
groups, fattening Vietcong body counts, bombing damage and South Vietnamese
client efficacy that proved victory, falsifying the intelligence reports that
discovered awkward enemy strength and with it the unwanted signs of losing
another war. Massively beribboned chests
of commanders in
Southeast Asia, would be unintended reminders of how much the
honor of citations. Like a debased
currency, ribbons for courage or exceptional service lost value as they accumulated,
with awards snidely known as “gongs,” oak leaf clusters as “rat turds,” the
once-respected air medal (800,000 of the total decorations) handed out for
almost any non-combat flight in the helicopter-swarming war, or even for
hauling holiday frozen turkeys snugly behind the lines. Decorations were heaped so bountifully on
generals along with lesser staff officers that valor in such numbers, wrote one
combat veteran, was “incomprehensible.”
To
“grunts,” as they related again and again, the war was too often fought with
their officers 2,000 feet up in the comparative safety of the “eye in the sky”
command helicopters rather than with their “ass in the grass” with their
troops. Casualty figures were telling. In over a decade of fighting, with over
57,000 American dead, only four generals and eight colonels fell in combat—commissioned
rank a guarantee of survival as for no other modern military at war (save
perhaps in Iraq and Afghanistan in figures yet to come). “The officer corps simply did not die in
sufficient numbers or in the presence of their men often enough,” concluded two
postwar analysts of the army’s resulting “crisis.”
With corruption of
standards came inevitable loss of morale.
To soldiers of honor at every level the ignorance, self-protection and
widespread opportunism of so many superiors made
“the dark ages in the army’s history.” Through
the ranks, unprecedented, ran the unchecked contagion of disintegration—refusal of orders amounting to mutiny,
desertions in the tens of thousands, the drug epidemic and race riots,
uncounted, unaccountable atrocities, and not least the assassination of
officers and noncoms by their own men, the American military’s internecine murder
which acquired its own ugly Vietnam name, “fragging.” Among the officer corps, according to a
war-college appraisal, there had been “a clear loss of military ethic,” not to
be explained simply by the then largely citizen-soldier, draft-dependent army. Altogether, another study concluded still
more clinically and bluntly, the armed forces in
ineffective, almost anomic mass,” its commanders high and low manifesting
“severe pathologies.”
Added to the war’s
vast profiteering and waste, all this spurred an exodus of disillusioned military
professionals (unprecedented and unmatched until the Iraq War), depriving the
services of most of their most promising young leaders. It also produced by 1975-1976 an unparalleled
outpouring of public and internal criticism with often shocking revelations by
officers, enlisted men, and other knowledgeable observers in and out of
government. Yet atop the Pentagon at the
height of the now furious, now anguished outcry, what an admiral witnessing it
called a “real rebellion of the heart,” Rumsfeld took no meaningful part in the
airing or soul-searching, much less control or cleansing of the pestilent
contract and accounting scandals, and effectively ignored, dismissed or on
occasion repressed and punished critics and whistle-blowers, remaining stolidly
aligned with the worst of the system’s status quo and unmoved in his own
right-wing view of the war abroad and at home.
Typically—and in yet another grim foreshadowing of Iraq and its Abu
Ghraib and Afghanistan with its Bagram—when Congressional questions began to be
asked about the involvement of the U.S. military as well as CIA in the Saigon
regime’s infamous “Tiger Cage” torture camps in South Vietnam during the early
1970s, Rumsfeld led the Ford Administration in blocking damaging disclosures
until the issue eventually trailed off.
It was one more plot of buried history—along with a seedy CIA front, the
Office of Public Safety, implicated in advising and abetting client regimes’ secret
police “renditions” and torture worldwide until its quiet disbanding by
Congress in 1975—with echoes into the twenty-first century.
Officially, the
crumbling of discipline and performance in
military’s long-festering venality and incompetence, but on the ready
scapegoats of antiwar agitation and the larger social turbulence of the 1960s,
a perfect fit with the Rumsfeld-Cheney demonology. Counterattack on critics was vicious. “Overlong in battle and emotionally
unbalanced,” one Pentagon-kept military columnist smeared an officer of legendary
heroism who publicly deplored the careerism.
While under Ford’s calming, anodyne post-Watergate presidency
gladly celebrated its Bicentennial, the tide of self-awareness in the Pentagon was
“allowed to recede,” as a later study recorded, and officers “whose careers
were deeply rooted in the polices and practices [of the war] finally prevailed.” The latter included leaders of the 1991 Gulf
War and 2003
most famously Colin Powell, who as a mid-grade careerist was personally
involved in a whitewash of
When a
superintendent of West Point was earlier removed for his own implication in the
dining hall full of sympathetic cadets with the old General Joe Stillwell adage
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Of whom the “bastards” were the new Secretary of Defense in 1975 and his
unreconstructed high command had no doubt.
In the siege mentality of Rumsfeld’s post-Vietnam Pentagon, the
besieging force was never its self-inflicted scourge, never a blindly misjudged
nationalism or intrepid insurgency, corrupt untenable clients, or the
persistent folly, self-delusion and ultimate self-betrayal of U.S. policy, but
rather the curse of wavering civilian masters at home, craven Washington
politicians and the old foreign policy establishment, especially Democrats, and
in the end a public too swayed by treachery of a mythological “liberal media.” It was to be Rumsfeld’s historic legacy from
1976—to rubber stamp the Great Evasion of the military and the sullen
ideological right fleeing headlong Vietnam defeat—jettisoning responsibility,
much as Saigon’s American-bred profiteers cast cumbersome loot from their Mercedeses
as they honked south through pitiful hordes of refugees before the final North
Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975.
Not loss by root folly, self-deception and self-perpetuating blunder,
but from home front perfidy, the hoary stab in the back. Not ignorance and impotence but undue imposed
restraint. (“Do we get to win this time?”
Rambo asks in one of the movie’s
sequels, echoing the denial and self-delusion of so many
careerist officers.) Not to heal its own
institutional rot, much less grasp the decisive political-historical character
of conflict fought against outside set-piece conventions of the European plain
or
thirty-eight parallel. If that new war, beyond
Clausewitz’s politik by other means,
was shaped more by deluded Washington policy and the politics of some inscrutable postcolonial people than by the
latest U.S. technology and the sloganeered tactics it dictated—search and
destroy, carpet bombing, shock and awe—there would be, as Ward Just lamented,
no American thinker in power to understand then or later.
While U.S. foreign
policy—in heedless covert action, the orgy of globalism begun even before the
fall of the Soviet Union, and then the reactionary mania loosed by 9/11—broadcast
the seeds of new insurgencies (the prospects of what a handful of largely
ignored theorists called in new/old terminology Fourth Generation Warfare), serious
study of counter-insurgency, the irreducible political limits and basic futility
and liability of the old military in political
wars, all but vanished from Pentagon planning and even the service schools’
curricula. (The Iraq war would be years
old and lost by the time the army revised, post-mortem as it were, its little-read
counter-insurgency manual written two decades before and anachronistic even
then.) Vietnam lesson unlearned, careerist blight and contract pillage uninterrupted,
the military system’s answer to its scapegoat of backstabbing—already emerging
as orthodoxy under Rumsfeld in 1976—would be the simplistic, foolproof dictum,
claimed by Powell but hardly his originally, of fighting only with overwhelming
forces, firepower and air cover. (As if
the Army or Navy football team would only play by its own rules and referees
with thirty-three men in the latest equipment to the other team’s eleven
without helmets or pads and no ability to pass.) It would be applied in settings allowing the post-Vietnam
Pentagon’s ever costlier, ever more “managed” high-tech bludgeon to be wielded
against suitably feeble foes, without troublesome duration of engagement or the
need for political understanding, shades of Taylor’s “win quickly” with
everyone agreeing, certainly the losers.
Intelligence gaffes
and civilian carnage aside as usual, results were encouraging in
the 1991 turkey shoot of the First Gulf War, carefully conducted to keep
American casualties to the level of industrial accidents. Fastidious, blameless brevity and detachment
tended, of course, to sacrifice controlling the political outcome in any geo-politically
meaningful arena—as in allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power after
expulsion from Kuwait, and so to butcher Shiite rebels thinking the moment ripe
to overthrow him themselves, regrettably misreading Pentagon imperatives. Chilled by a ghost they stoutly denied for
decades, commanders and defense secretaries would not repeat hot pursuit into
until the undertaker’s fortuitous last chance at greatness.
III
On
Ford’s 1976 defeat by Carter, Rumsfeld went off to corporate wealth as head of
the Skokie pharmaceutical company inherited by the family of his
friend and early backer Dan Searle. More
of the media and Congressional share in the negligence at his 2001 confirmation,
the glancing, readily purveyed legend of his time at G.D. Searle would be a
paean to Rumsfeld as master manager:
Political prodigy slashes payroll 60%, turns decrepit loser to mega-profit-maker,
earns industry plaques and multiple millions. (Given to a smug fecklessness in looking
at men of government prominence like Rumsfeld gone to and from the private
sector, the Washington media almost invariably adopt the press release or
booster business page version of events out there in what inside the beltway calls
“the real world”—not only because it is unknown territory requiring added work,
but also as if matters of a mere company were surely beneath loftier affairs of
state and, of course, the reporters covering them) Behind the image of corporate savior was
still more relevant, warning history.
In the documented
reality from litigation and relatively obscure investigations in the U.S. and
abroad, Searle enjoyed its notable rise under Rumsfeld after 1977 less by some
innovative executive genius than by old-fashioned reckless marketing of
pharmaceuticals already on the shelf and the lobbying “markers” of its
well-connected Republican as CEO—over it all the distinctive odor of corrupt
practices. A case in point was Searle’s
anti-diarrhea Lomotil, ever more widely and profitably sold internationally (in
industry terms “dumped”), especially in
in the late 1970s, despite the company’s failure to warn of its dire effects on
younger children. “A blindly harmful
stopcock,” one medical journal called it, the remedy could be poisonous to
infants only slightly above Searle’s recommended dosage, and even taken
according to directions was known to mask dangerous dehydration and cause a
lethal build-up of fluids internally. Having
advertised Lomotil as “ideal for every situation,” Searle did not undertake a
cautionary labeling change until the end of 1981, nearly five years into
Rumsfeld’s tenure, and then only when threatened with damaging publicity by
children’s advocacy groups. Part of the
vast outrage of multinational “pharmas” exploiting the Third World, the company
under Rumsfeld would also be implicated over the latter 1970s, like the more
publicized Upjohn with its Depo-Provera, in widespread bribery of officials and
others in poorer countries to promote the sale of oral contraceptives despite
the same medications being found unsafe for American or European women.
But Searle’s magic
potion, concocted well before Rumsfeld, was to be the controversial artificial sweetener
aspertame, under the trade name NutraSweet. By 1977, the Food and Drug Administration had
staunchly refused to approve aspertame for some sixteen years, including under
the Nixon and Ford regimes, finding test data dubious or inconclusive and
potential long-term dangers prohibitive.
As Rumsfeld took over in
FDA was taking the rare step of recommending to Justice Department prosecutors
that a grand jury investigate the company in its applications for “willful and knowing failure to make
reports…concealing material facts and making false statements.” Over the next four years the tug of war
continued with federal regulators holding firm against Searle’s heavily
financed campaigns. Then, with Reagan’s election in 1980, fix and
favor quickly supplanted science and the public interest. Having campaigned for the new president and
been named to the transition team, Rumsfeld told his Searle sales force,
according to later testimony, that "he would call in all his markers and
that no matter what, he would see to it that aspartame would be approved…” The sequel would have it all, a classic of
the genre: Searle’s reapplication to
the FDA the day Reagan was inaugurated, the prompt appointment of an agreeable
FDA commissioner who would later go to work for Searle’s public relations firm
for a thousand dollars a day, more questionable company-commissioned tests with
more doubts by FDA scientists but now approval of aspertame nonetheless, a
later plague of health problems but vast profits throughout the corporate
economy from food to soft drinks with lavish multi-company contributions to
Congressional committee members to stifle the outcry, eventually a $350-million
class action suit alleging racketeering, fraud and multiple abuses centering on
Rumsfeld, who meanwhile had become gloriously rich from aspertame and the $2.7-billion
sale of Searle to Monsanto in 1985, and went duly unscathed by any of the
company history in his 2001 return to the Pentagon. By the time the litigation was filed,
occupation of
As it was,
Rumsfeld missed in his business conquests an even greater prize. He had been on a short list for Reagan’s
running mate in 1980 when the candidate unexpectedly reached for his defeated
primary rival and Rumsfeld nemesis George H.W. Bush. While over the next twelve years Bush went on
to the vice-presidency and presidency, and Jim Baker, whom Rumsfeld equally
detested, went along with his patron to White House staff and cabinet power,
Rumsfeld would build his Searle fortune and bide his time. The one exception to that involuntary Reagan-era
exile from government would be his stint in 1983-1984 as a special presidential
envoy to the Middle East, sent to arrange U.S. support of Iraq in its war over
the 1980s with the hated Iranians, a role little noticed at the time but which
produced the later notorious photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam. The inner story was far more than an
embarrassing handshake.
Most of the
relevant records of his several months in that assignment remain classified,
though it is clear that Rumsfeld, as at OEO, took on the time-honored
bureaucratic passion for the raison d’etre, and thus success, of his mission—working
to shower on Saddam, covertly and as unnoticed as possible in what remained
open, what became known as an infamous flow of intelligence, financial credits,
and sensitive materials and technology that underpinned the Iraqi chemical and
bacteriological warfare programs, led to hideous gas attacks on Iraqi Shia dissidents
and Kurds as well as Iranian forces, and generally shored up the war-worn
Ba’athist regime that had attacked Iran in 1980 with a nod from the Carter
regime and the anti-Iranian Saudis to begin with.
In this mid-1980s
de facto alliance with Saddam, as in much else, Rumsfeld was never alone—joined
in the policy by Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz,
Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, successive National Security Advisors
William Clark and Robert McFarlane, and a number of lesser, still obscure men
like Wolfowitz at State, Colin Powell as Weinberger’s aide at the Pentagon,
along with Jackson’s Perle now as an assistant secretary of defense and his
zealot acolyte assistant Douglas Feith (who would return in pivotal work for
Rumsfeld in 2001) as well as Casey and Gates at the CIA and a number of other
officials. Their gambit was backed by Senators
and Congressmen in both parties who were briefed on Rumsfeld’s mission and obligingly
shunned oversight of the manifold, sometimes illegal collusion, their
dereliction assured in part by the general animus toward Iran on a Capitol Hill
then effectively controlled by the Republicans, in part by the bipartisan hold of
the Israeli lobby and its Tel Aviv handlers, who quietly, cynically pushed for
both U.S. help to Iraq and covert aid to Iran (exposed in the later Iran-Contra
scandal), viewing the carnage of two Islamic states as a boon. As usual, it was all abetted by the customary
media diffidence or indolence in national security. Historically, the moral outrage and political
blunder of the mid-1980s that was Washington’s furtive arming of one tyranny in
Iraq to bleed another in Iran, with untold casualties on each side, including the
murderous suppression of would-be democrats in both countries, would belong at
the doorstep of Reagan’s reactionary government and Washington’s national security
regime far beyond Rumsfeld.
At the same time, in
the intelligence briefings he received as the first ranking U.S. official to go
to Iraq since the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s, Rumsfeld was uniquely focused as
no other figure in Washington—or at least responsibly should have been—on the
character of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the considerable storehouse of what
Washington knew of the sectarian, regional and clan politics in a government
the CIA itself had recruited and installed in the coup of 1963, re-installed in
1968 when the Agency’s original clients lost control, and then watched closely
for its ongoing flirtation and arms supply relationship with the Russians in
the interim, particularly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 with its aftermath
of Arab-Israeli peace agreements from which Iraq emerged as a principal
remaining challenge to Israel.. By
1983-1984, the volatile complex currents of Iraq’s political culture, Saddam’s
essentially clan rule and the now crude, now subtle layering of Sunni and Shia
in the Ba’athist bureaucracy and plutocracy—and especially during the war with Iran
the distrust and savage repression of the ever-suspect and -subordinate Shia majority—were
well known to outside intelligence agencies as well as scholars and
journalists. The
CIA, DIA and State Department intelligence bureau—and thus Rumsfeld as
presidential envoy in dealing directly with Iraq as a high stakes surrogate against
the Iranian mullahs— also had reason to understand much about the Baghdad
regime’s cunning and determination in Saddam’s grandiose ambition, in an old
rivalry with Egypt, to lead a pan-Arab nationalist renaissance in some parity
with Israel’s nuclear-armed military might.
In addition to the usual extensive intelligence sharing with Mossad, CIA
operatives less than two years before Rumsfeld’s Iraq mission had literally lit
the way for Israeli F-16 fighter bombers in their June 1981 surprise attack on
Saddam’s fledgling reactor at Osiraq, planting guidance transmitters along the
low-level flight path under Jordanian and Iraqi radar to the point of painting
the target with lasers. The Agency and
Mossad then watched as the Iraqis dauntlessly, defiantly began to rebuild and
expand their program, from some 400 scientists and technicians with $400 million, to
perhaps 7,000 with as much as $10 billion, some of which was made possible
indirectly by
aid Rumsfeld carried in 1983-1984. For
anyone dealing seriously with these issues—substantive seriousness, as apart
from intellectually careless and shallow personal advancement, again and again the term of reference in
this story—there could have been little doubt that Saddam would use the
considerable aid Rumsfeld was sliding under the table, and any larger gain from
a better-armed war with Iran, to further the regime’s most aggressive weapons
development, and to move from a U.S.-strengthened position to tyrannize all the
more savagely Iraqi Shiites and Kurds.
In the event, as
watched, he did it all—and no one could or should have known more than Rumsfeld. Long
afterward, as the ugly essence of his Reagan mission dribbled out amid the ruin
of the Iraq occupation, Rumsfeld would be faulted for his pandering 1984
diplomacy in Baghdad to appease the tyranny (the gassing of the Kurds had
already begun).after a timorous, hypocritical Washington statement denouncing
use of chemical weapons. The toll of the
policy would be much more. Iraqi
chemical weapons plants bombed in the 1991 Gulf War and releasing agents to
which some 100,000 American troops were exposed, the pandemic of the infamous
Gulf War Syndrome, would trace in large measure to the materiel and technology
afforded by Rumsfeld’s knowing acts seven years before. So, too, would the brutal 1980s repression of
the Iraqi Shia that made Rumsfeld’s mission then the mocking parent of
irreducible Shia vengeance and suspicion deepening the American debacle, his
historic failure, after 2003.
Others obviously bore
responsibility at every turn. Powell as
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Cheney as Secretary of Defense in 1991
were directly complicit in the Syndrome scandal. Yet none of the participants in the larger
post-9/11 disaster stood in so direct a line of heedless cynicism for so long
and so knowingly as Don Rumsfeld—the ignoring of Iraqi politics in a history in
which those politics were and would be decisive, the constant, utter disregard
of the horrendous human costs of policy in Iraq and beyond. When Reagan’s special envoy in 1983-1984 was
with his usual energy and sharp elbows dickering with the Iraqis, Condoleeza
Rice was an assistant professor of no scholarly distinction at Stanford, Cheney
a third-term congressman from Wyoming squirming up the House leadership, L.
Paul “Jerry” Bremer gone from State Department clerk and Haig protégé to
ambassador to the Netherlands known for his lavish parties, and George W. Bush,
still by his own account given to “heavy drinking,” absorbed in changing the
name of his chronically failed Arbusto Energy.
By 1987, Rumsfeld
was flexing once more for the ultimate goal, assembling money and party support
for a presidential run against George H. W. Bush in 1988. But after a dozen years out of office, and
against the entrenched power of an heir apparent, backing was not there. Off much more recent prominence and a wider
political base as a right-wing congressman and then defense secretary in
1989-92, Cheney would try to mount his own presidential campaign in the early
1990s, only to meet the same bitter rejection
Historians will only guess at the
rancor of these two deeply disappointed, deeply ambitious figures in the
presidency of a George W. Bush they no doubt saw as manifestly, maddeningly
inferior (not to mention a Powell or Rice, unimaginable as secretary of state
or national security advisor in either
a Rumsfeld or Cheney administration). The
Rumsfeld-Cheney recompense, at vast cost to the nation and world, would be
their fierce seizure of power after 9/11.
Rumsfeld spent the
1990s again in business, often and lucratively in shadowy byways, becoming CEO
of General Instruments, then Chairman of Gilead Sciences Pharmaceuticals, with more
history reminiscent of Searle. In 1990 he
joined the board of ABB, a Swedish-Swiss conglomerate that had gobbled up
companies in the latter 1980s, including Westinghouse energy operations, and
would move aggressively to win a $200-million contract for “the design and key
components” for light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea—a prize pursued while
Rumsfeld chaired a Congressional commission on missile threats that found a
“clear danger” from Pyongyang. In the
alarming report, his otherwise fulsome resume failed to mention that he was an
ABB director.
In 1996, he took leave
from
advisor, along with Wolfowitz, in Dole’s presidential run, and would end as the
campaign’s eighteen-hour-a-day manager.
By 1997, amid the full-scale takeover of the Washington GOP by the
long-churning cabal of neo-cons, he joined Cheney and Wolfowitz on a Newt
Gingirch-instigated Congressional Policy Advisory Board to shape attacks on the
second Clinton Administration. In
January 1998 there was the celebrated letter to Clinton from the right-wing,
Israeli lobby-dominated Project for a New American Century, signed by Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Perle and others to be key in the Bush regime, urging the “removal”
of Saddam—and then that July the “Rumsfeld Commission” report on missile
threats, wildly claiming, in an unnamed debut of the “Axis of Evil” drawn more
from the testimony and staff work of right-wing ideologues than any intelligence
or authentic expertise, that Iran, Iraq and North Korea would each be able to
“inflict major destruction” on the U.S. by 2002. Through it all, as over the first
seven-and-a-half months of their rule after the seamy election of 2000, there
would be no trace of the actual threat that erupted out of a September morning
sky in 2001.
Though he had
repaired relations with the Bushes, he took no major role and thus likely
reward in the 2000 race. But when Cheney vetoed
and there was throbbing neo-con worry that a cosmetic Powell, bureaucrat at
heart, would be captive to State Department equivocation and make it far too
influential, Rumsfeld was the reply. It was a mark of the extreme poverty of
Republican talent that the administration reflected so graphically—the supposed
party of national security, with the White House for five terms of the last
eight and Congressional dominance for much of the past thirty years, yet no
evident alternative to a man who sat atop the PeIntagon a full quarter century
before, and apart from the patently right-wing, widely discredited missile
panel, had no credential or even palpable interest in ever more complex defense
issues since then. Fit, relatively
youthful at 69, Rumsfeld strode again into the E Ring. There was plausible speculation that the old Halloween
Massacre goal was still there, that Cheney with uncertain health could step
aside in 2004, that the undertaker might yet reach the Oval Office.
IV
Rumsfeld began his
Pentagon reprise seizing on a dead Russian marshal and an octogenarian
ever heard of.
Like Osama bin
Laden, steely-haired Nikolai Ogarkov came to light during the Soviet war in
of the Soviet General Staff, in that superannuated, medal-mummified company a
dynamic, technically inclined, forward-thinking young general. Over ensuing years he would be an impressive
Moscow spokesman on arms control, defend stubbornly, abjectly the 1983 shoot
down of the Korean Airlines 747, fall from power in a 1984 Kremlin struggle
over weapons spending, and write a valedictory book to warn of American
militarism, dying in post-Soviet obscurity in 1994. But Ogarkov’s main if esoteric distinction
would be in a slight 1982 pamphlet in which he blamed the nearly conclusive
early Russian defeats in World War II on the failure to adapt to the new blitzkrieg
concepts in tank warfare. Recent
advances in weapons technology, he argued, now dictated the same kind of sweeping
changes in tactics and arms, and generally more agile, responsive armed forces,
capable of avoiding the devastating traps of the new remote-targeted
battlefield, and striking swiftly utilizing the latest information systems in
altogether high-tech warfare. Deployed
in intramural budget and ideological maneuvers in defense ministries on both
sides of the cold war, the concept soon gained vogue as what was grandly
christened and welcomed by Pentagon aficionados as the “Revolution in Military
Affairs,” RMA.
There
was a certain banality in Ogarkov’s stress on technology, even amid the laggard,
stultified upper reaches of the Soviet military of the early 1980s. That a fighting force best be attuned to the
battlefield of the moment, modern, adaptable, quick and informed was
self-evident, on the order of the Russo-Japanese War’s bloody lesson in Tsarist
cavalry charging entrenched machine guns.
Yet however obvious the premise, RMA’s alerting to a new American-financed
generation of electronic warfare, near nuclear effects with non-nuclear means, along
with Ogarkov’s call for fresh tactics thus new weaponry thus higher spending,
became a tautology serving innovators, opportunists and their assorted hybrids
in any military establishment. This was particularly
so at the time among the Soviets, whose rusty Europe-heavy knight of a military
was being shaken as its tentative, yet too-garrisoned forces in Afghanistan were
bled by the Mujahideen (albeit in 1982-1983 the Afghans, still only partially
armed by their cynical CIA and Pakistani sponsors, went even more bloodied
themselves). At any rate, Ogarkov’s
truism was also grist for the Pentagon’s back-ring band of civilian military
“theorists,” career bureaucrats ever in search of a mission and habitually
disposed to attribute evil genius—requiring a suitable
Menace.
Short,
bald, with stylishly severe wire-rimmed glasses, Andrew Marshall was the
Pentagon Dickensian clerk of a man who took up the bureaucratic cudgel RMA
presented. An economist by training, he
had begun at RAND as an analyst in the late 1940s, when Rumsfeld was still in
autogenesis, the career-making fear and folly, of the U.S.-Russian
looking-glass rivalry—protégé of World War III theorist Herman Kahn, then via
Kissinger mentor Fritz Kraemer working for Kissinger at the NSC, and by 1973 on
to the Pentagon to sit on his own obscure nest, the Office of Net Assessment, from
Rumsfeld I to II. Discreet guru to
reactionaries, thus ignored but thought untouchable by Democrats,
Joint Chiefs spied on Kissinger’s arms control negotiations (the long-neglected
1970-1971 yeoman-admiral espionage scandal) and for the same reason played an
ardent supporting role in Nixon’s fall.
He subsequently joined Rumsfeld I’s denial of Vietnam, and then on RMA’s
advent, used it (though Ogarkov was arguing for a Russian response to a still largely undeployed American escalation of weaponry and warfare) to evoke ominous new
Kremlin arming and so justify the orgy of Pentagon spending during the Reagan
1980s. While that spree paid for some of
the new RMA theater warfare, it was snugly within the corrupt and third
world-politically obtuse old system, with armed forces tailored to a Soviet threat,
and no adaptation to neo-insurgency wars ahead.
As Marshall toyed with “flexibility” —and the Joint Chiefs cherry-picked
his conjuring of Moscow’s might for their own budget purposes while ignoring
what RMA might mean in any real change—the cold war ended to the equivocations
and evasions of Clinton’s two terms and the low-rent, self-congratulatory
installing of mafia regimes in Bosnia and Kosovo. Gnome-like
witness before the missile threat commission, hung on for Rumsfeld’s return.
The
resulting history is far too close for much documented detail, of course, though
the larger shape is plain. Summoning
Rumsfeld made RMA the logo of his determination to gain the dominance over the
chiefs and bureaucracy he thought he had missed twenty-five years before. Under the banner of the old clash between a
brave beleaguered secretary of defense
and the recalcitrant brass astride the impossible “glandular” system, the all-purpose,
all-seasons ideal of Pentagon “reform,” it was to be his ultimate takedown and
claim to greatness, and perhaps—who knew in 2001—the presidency. Amid the inevitable claims of “streamlining”
and “modernizing,” Democrats applauded and media gushed reflexively, epitomized
by the New Yorker’s Peter Boyer, his
and other renditions of pre-2006 Rumsfeld as celebrity CEO the embarrassing
toll of leaving Clausewitz’s politik to
fluent feature writers. The willing ignorance,
denial, careless trust or craven acquiescence that marked the essential
submissiveness of the political culture to Rumsfeld’s rule—the habitual
blindness to the inner condition, wider relevance and massive budgetary
corruption of the American military—were only part, certainly, of the thoughtless
national abdication of judgment and responsibility in the wars in both
Afghanistan and Iraq. In attacking at
9/11 as a reflexive, grandly opportunistic, richly self-satisfying political act in America without serious
understanding of the politics and history in either country, the plunge into
blundering, plundering occupations without understanding the simple meaning of
overthrowing one deplorable regime only
to replace it with another, made the nightmares of 2007 and beyond nearly
inevitable. But then that was the
price—so painfully plain in the utter absence of any serious public dialogue
about governance and foreign policy in the 2000 election and the first eight
months of 2001—of the original ceding of virtually unlimited power to a
combination of presidential incompetence (including the shocking ineptitude of
his supposedly fail-safe NSA Advisor and staff), the undisguised presence of an
unprecedented cabal of men deep inside national security decision-making with
their own fixed agenda serving alien interests, and, of course, the long
predictable Rumsfeld-Cheney dominance.
None of it was seriously questioned, much less challenged, by Congress
or the preponderant media. No democratic
process so completely failed a test of substance as
In
the exhilarating dash to Baghdad in 2003, none of the admiring gallery seemed
to notice that Rumsfeld’s “new” military was so largely the old, “reformed” in
name only—much less that the vaunted lean mean machine of RMA and the again
lionized Marshall, even if transformation had been authentic, had no grasp to
begin with of the politics of the profoundly political act just done in overthrowing forty years of Ba’athist
rule, the deeply political campaign
to which so many American lives, so much of the country’s material and symbolic
national treasures were now committed.
Rumsfeld would make his victory tour in the Gulf that spring as if
circling the mat after a stunningly swift pin.
What was his toughest call, they asked—part of the garlands, after all—and
how did he “feel” at such a victorious moment. Hardly the time to reflect on how much “shock
and awe” depended on overwhelming force brought down on the near-defenseless,
how much the very concept reeked of racism and colonial pretense, the natives
“shocked and awed” like Zulus pounded and panicked by the Queen’s own latest
howitzers. It was too early to be shown
other questions—about a force cosseted at the end of vulnerable supply lines, nicely
photogenic in night goggles but without enough body armor, about acronyms like
IED neither commanders nor reporters yet tossed off, about the chase for medals
and the absence of an enemy admitting defeat, resigned to its punishment, to
the new political outcome, a missing essential of “victory” that would have
much worried Maxwell Taylor. Unreformed,
uninformed commanders, uninstructed beyond brief battles, led their charges
into
relying on generals. Generals relied on
civilians. Civilians relied on, were in
such numbers, Neo-Cons. Neo-Cons relied
on their ersatz expertise, Mossad, Iraqi exiles. Exiles—holed up in palaces with U.S.-paid-for
mercenary guards, ignorant and contemptuous of the Iraq that had passed them by
with martyrdom and sacrifice beyond any in London or Amman, Cairo or Beirut,
not to mention the talk show and think tank warriors’ Washington—relied on
Americans. Rumsfeld, as always, relied
on himself. The ranks trusted him and political
decision-makers to supply the intelligence and guidance needed, and if not, to
stand up and stand aside. When they did
neither, condemning the American force to a slow wasting attrition of men and
prestige, Neo-Con mediocrity and corruption, their treason of clerks, Rumsfeld’s
betrayal, were complete.
Behind
the debacle were his three lasting legacies.
As
no other cabinet officer in history, he opened his government to the
penetration of a Sixth Column of men of blatantly confused and thus splintered
loyalty. “Like cancer cells,” as retired
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiakowski saw them in one of the same offices before
the war. Half-educated creatures whose
chief qualification was their slavish loyalty to Israeli- or Israeli
Lobby-captive think tanks and other auspices, they crowded the domains of the Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose career was a model of their kind, as
well as the notorious Office of Special Plans, the fount of Neo-Con fraudulent
intelligence, and spread throughout the rest of national security
governance. Never before had men of such
transparent adherence to the policies of a foreign power been so placed in
American Bund or the American Communist Party had taken charge of Cordell
Hull’s State Department. The toll in the
potential for compromise of national security was, and would remain for
decades, incalculable.
As
no other cabinet officer in history, he turned over crucial self-sustaining
functions of his department to privateers and private armies. He surrendered vital supply and commissariat
services for the American military to profit-plundering contractors for whom
U.S. forces were neither fellow warriors nor even share-holders, but captive
“customers” to be treated with the offhandedness afforded by guaranteed
contracts. He ceded security and combat
functions essential to the national mission to a corps of thousands of hired
guns whose qualifications, standards of conduct and ultimate loyalty—all
integral to the safety and success of American forces—were beyond effective
governmental control or measure. Not
since the British hired hordes of Hessians to crush George Washington’s rebel
army had a military force tracing to
on policy and the armed forces would not be known for years.
As
no other cabinet officer in history, he squandered the integrity of his department
and the unique, indispensable code of honor of its services. In joining and often leading the rest of an
intellectually degraded administration heedless of Constitutional and human
rights, violating the very heart of their ostensibly conservative convictions
in ready sanctioning and then de facto cover-up of abuses at Abu Ghraib, Bagram
and Guantanamo, he changed for untold millions the symbol of America and its
once-proud military from freedom and the rule of law to the unforgettable
prisoner’s hood and shackles. Rumsfeld’s
legacies would not vanish with terms or elections but, by the very nature of
contracts, personnel practices and imparted ethics, among
remain deep in the tissue and soul of the institution he was entrusted to
lead. At the end, the pathetic climax to
his more than four decades in government or imploringly on its threshold, there
was only his hackneyed memo— leaked, even more pathetically, as if it were
vindicating. Thus he advised that the
Iraqi regime, like some seedy wrestling team, “pull up its socks,” and, most
poignantly, appearances all, ever the politician conducting lethal policy as
politics, that Washington “announce that whatever new
approach the US decides on, the US is doing so on a trial basis. This will give
us the ability to re-adjust and move to another course, if necessary, and
therefore not ‘lose.’ ” As he left office for the last time, it would
be only the loss that mattered—as a pathologically unfit president struggled to recoup his historic blunder, as the Navy
and Air Force, relatively left out of the Iraq action, promised wondrous
results in Iran, as the chaos and ineffable danger were left to Gates the puffy
courtier.
Weeks
after his departure, history, whatever was ever known, was already being forgotten,
the past too complicated and troublesome, too guilt-ridden and close to home,
to deal with here in its chilling consequence.
The worst of it, after all, was the most basic and damning. Don Rumsfeld and all he represented, all he
did and did not do, came out of us—the undertaker’s tally, including Iraq,
compiled at out leave, one way or another, at every turn. His tragedy was always ours.
Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on
the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and
Nixon, and after resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, as an advisor in the
U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, writes
this history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive
research. A Senior Fellow of the Green
Institute, he is an award-winning historian, investigative journalist and
author of acclaimed books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the
His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US covert interventions and policy in the Middle East
and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.