McNamara, Rumsfeld and the Fog of War

History doesn't repeat itself, Mark Twain observed, but it does tend to rhyme. The death of Robert McNamara this week has brought inevitable comparisons between "the architect of the Vietnam War" and Donald Rumsfeld, the "architect" of another war that has become unpopular.

Actually, the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq share little in common either in scale or purpose. Vietnam cost 58,000 American lives, perhaps 4 million Vietnamese, and ended in humiliating defeat. The Iraq expedition has cost, so far, 4,300 American lives; the great majority of the perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 Iraqi deaths have been at the hands of other Iraqis; and the outcome may yet be a messy success. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam was to prop up South Vietnam against aggression by the North. The invasion of Iraq was to achieve . . . what ?

Answering that question reveals what I've come to believe is the true and deeply ironic link between McNamara and Rumsfeld. In his handling of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, Rumsfeld was motivated by one overarching desire: to prevent a rerun of Vietnam. When historians come to disentangle the debacle of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, that has to be one of their starting points. Because it leads to a wholesale rethinking of the conventional wisdom about what happened.

When Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon in 1975 for his first stint as defense secretary, the United States and its military were reeling from Vietnam. Back in those Cold War days, the U.S. military was supposedly sized to handle "two and a half wars" simultaneously. Vietnam was seen as a "half war." But a decade of grinding conflict there swallowed the U.S. Army and came close to destroying it. Why? Libraries are filled with efforts to explain what went wrong. Rumsfeld himself, I think, took away three lessons. First, the U.S. Army in Vietnam was asked to win by military means a settlement that, in reality, could be achieved only by politics. Second, the U.S. brass never grasped this—neither the Army commanders nor the Joint Chiefs. Every setback in Vietnam caused no military rethinking of strategy, merely repeated calls for more troops. Most fundamentally, the whole expedition was misbegotten. America neither knew nor understood Vietnamese society; to believe the United States could remake Vietnam's political future to American liking was hubris.

A generation later, President Bush never actually asked Rumsfeld—or Colin Powell, his secretary of state—whether they agreed with his decision to overthrow Saddam. Had he been asked, though, Rumsfeld would have approved. He saw 9/11 as a watershed. America needed to act to deter Arab regimes from covertly supporting Al Qaeda—in the worst case, supplying Osama bin Laden with a nuclear weapon. Saddam was "the low-hanging fruit," as Rumsfeld's policy counselor, Douglas Feith, later put it to me. (Feith says now I must have misunderstood him; that, he says, was the reverse of his view.)

But Saddam's overthrow was essentially all that Rumsfeld thought the United States could prudently attempt. "Don was very clear about the limits of U.S. power," one of his closest colleagues said later. "All we could do in Iraq was to go in, overthrow Saddam, remove or destroy his WMD, and get out. Everything after that would be up to the Iraqis." Rumsfeld, in other words, remained the cautious Midwestern Republican of his generation: willing to exert U.S. power, but deeply skeptical of America's ability to remake the world. He had little patience with the dreams of neocons like his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who thought that the overthrow of Saddam would enable Washington to establish a democracy in Iraq, which in turn would catalyze democratic revolutions throughout the Arab world. "Don thought that was unknowable at best, and improbable the rest of the time," said another of his closest aides.