Published: February 5, 2011
So many to blame. So little space.
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Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages — including a scintillating List of Acronyms — to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is like a living, breathing version of the man himself: very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.
The 78-year-old Rumstud, as W. dubbed him, was both the youngest defense secretary in American history and the oldest. He traces a political career that spans a time when Lucy and Ricky were considered an “interracial relationship,” when Gerald Ford was “fresh blood” and when Richard Nixon still had a secret taping system. (He writes that Nixon once insisted he would bring peace to Vietnam, noting, “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks,” and dismissed his NATO staff as “a bunch of fairies.”)
Rummy met Dick Cheney when Cheney applied to be an intern in Rummy’s Congressional office, and they had many fine adventures, from figuring out how to keep the sun from shining on President Ford’s neck in the Oval Office to lowering American standards on torture.
The high school wrestling champ doesn’t wrestle with self-doubt. Rummy begins ladling out rationalizations in the preface. “The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognizes that the information those in positions of responsibility in government, as well as in other human endeavors, have at their disposal is almost always incomplete,” he writes. He quotes Clausewitz on the challenge of faulty intelligence and Socrates saying, “I neither know nor think that I know.”
When you think about it, it was really all the fault of his nemesis, George Herbert Walker Bush. Rummy writes how humiliating it was to run for president briefly in the 1988 Republican primary, with no money or name recognition, when front-runner Bush didn’t bother to show up for their candidate forums. Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. The end of the Persian Gulf war was about manners. The first President Bush had promised the allies he would merely shoo Saddam out of Kuwait, so that’s all he did. Any more would have been “unchivalrous,” as Rummy quotes Colin Powell saying.
No doubt Rummy feels that if he’d been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid, he could have been president. And he wouldn’t have made a hash of it, like some presidents he worked for. He wouldn’t have had indistinct chains of authority or confused lines of responsibility or unrestricted flow charts or unresolved internal conflicts or a paucity of interagency meetings or most grievous of all, memos that were not read and acted upon.
There were those in the military who considered Rumsfeld the devil incarnate, and those in diplomacy who considered him more ruthless than any global despot. Rummy dismisses reports of his masterminding as inaccurate rumors.
W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness. “I was still surprised by Governor Bush’s request to see me,” Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.
Starting on 9/11, Rummy pushed and maneuvered to blame Saddam for 9/11 despite the lack of evidence.
He excoriates others as scheming infighters. He writes that, despite her “affinity for” W., Condi was a bad N.S.C. chief, forcing consensus rather than letting contentious issues get to the president. He mocks her rhetoric trying to push democracy as secretary of state, especially her contention that “human rights trump security.” He notes with asperity that it was not her place to press Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to take off his uniform — much less to tell Rummy himself that the pinstripes on his old pants had faded away.
He blames Colin Powell for posturing with the press and George Tenet for being so cocky about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D. He claims viceroy Paul Bremer messed up Iraq, occupying too long, ignoring the chain of command and carving out a separate relationship with the president.
He even delicately blames the president, for not making incisive decisions at times on pressing matters and for not scheduling “a high-level meeting on my proposals” sent in a memo.
He says it was Tommy Franks who didn’t want a lot of ground forces in Tora Bora, when Osama got away from us. He blames the generals for not telling him he needed more troops to secure Iraq — as though he would have listened. He blames the Geneva Convention’s drafters for not knowing detainees of modern “asymmetrical” wars would need rougher treatment. He blames the Supreme Court for its “novel reasoning” defending detainee rights. He blames Katrina on ...
Oh, never mind. You get the idea.
