August 8, 2009
THE TRAGEDY OF DON RUMSFELD...:
The Rise and Fall of Donald Rumsfeld: a review of BY HIS OWN RULES: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld By Bradley Graham (CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL, 8/09/09, NY Times Book Review)
[R]umsfeld got things done. Bosses liked him better than subordinates did. He was “high on energy and intensity and low on frills and compliments.” Richard Nixon put him in charge first of the Office of Economic Opportunity, then of wage and price controls, and made him ambassador to NATO. Under Gerald Ford he became the White House chief of staff and then defense secretary, the youngest in history. (He would later become the oldest.) He kept Ford’s trust while sidelining his rivals, Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Such talents served him well as chief executive of the pharmaceuticals company G. D. Searle, where he turned a $28 million loss into a $72 million profit and brought aspartame to market; he got similar results in the early 1990s as C.E.O. of the General Instrument Corporation, a pioneer in high-definition television that needed a favorable hearing from the Federal Communications Commission.Rumsfeld’s ability to work Congress and the regulatory bodies helped him in business. By the end of the 1990s he was worth between $50 million and $210 million. But he was more than a glorified lobbyist. He amassed information patiently and thoroughly, and would not be bullied into acting before he had mastered it. And he has never lost his ruthlessness in questioning structures kept in place by mere inertia.
As a candidate, George W. Bush had called for armed forces that were “agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a minimum of logistical support.” Rumsfeld seemed ideal for the task. “I’ve never been in a company where I couldn’t save 15 percent,” he said in 2001. The fascination of Rumsfeld, the tragedy of him, is that the Iraq occupation was nearly wrecked by the kind of mistakes he had spent his career diagnosing. By the time Rumsfeld resigned, the day after Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterm elections, the United States was on the verge of outright defeat. The replacement of his strategy with that of the so-called surge has stabilized Iraq greatly.
...is that the war that mattered was his against the Pentagon and the Hill, not the occupation of Iraq. But he was certainly correct that if we'd just withdrawn immediately the surge would have occurred in 2003 instead of 2006, because the portions of it that were determinative were Iraqi (first Shi'a turning on Sunni and then Sunni turning on Salafists to relieve the pressure from Shi'a militias), not American.