McNamara, Rumsfeld and the Fog of War

Rumsfeld's own view remained fixed—as his oldest friend in the Pentagon, then-Air Force secretary James Roche, bears witness. Roche and Rumsfeld shared Chicago roots and Washington ties going back 30 years. Within the Pentagon, Roche was viewed with some awe as one of the few who could answer back to Rumsfeld. In fall 2002, Roche went with a colleague to see Rumsfeld to voice their fears about U.S. intervention in Iraq. "Don, you do realize Iraq could be another Vietnam," Roche said. Rumsfeld appeared outraged. "Vietnam? Do you think you have to tell me about Vietnam?" he said. "Of course it won't be another Vietnam. We are going to go in, overthrow Saddam, and get out. That's it." (Rumsfeld, who is writing his memoirs, declined to comment on Roche's account.)

But Rumsfeld, conscious of the support the neocons had in the White House, allowed Wolfowitz to continue planning a more expansive democracy-building mission. This led to jarring collisions. Just before the March 2003 invasion, a group of think-tank commentariat were summoned to the Pentagon for an off-the-record preview of the administration's plans. The first 40 minutes were consumed, those present recall, by Wolfowitz's staffers laying out a grand scheme to bring democracy to Iraq. Then Rumsfeld breezed in. "Forget everything you've just heard," he said. "We're going to go in, overthrow Saddam, remove his WMD, and get out." The commentariat departed, bewildered.

Rumsfeld's determination—no more Vietnams—is the primary reason why there was no planning for "phase four," the aftermath of the invasion. (Another reason is that Rumsfeld's insistent interventions brought chaos to Army planning.) Rumsfeld and the U.S. commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, were clear. There wasn't going to be a phase four, because the Iraqis were going to continue running the place. The goal was "regime implosion": Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, reiterated this to the British ambassador, Christopher Meyer, only weeks before the invasion. That explains Rumsfeld's obsession with getting to fast. "Speed was such an important component of the war plan because . . . we were looking to decapitate the regime and do it fast," one of Rumsfeld's aides said. The Iraqi Army was seen as central to this, as the aide explained: "If we can get the regime to collapse, we'd have the Iraqis' own security forces in place, and now it's a matter of providing a new government. It was more than a hope. It was a reasoned assumption that, if we can do it fast, the Iraqi Army would remain in being."

The reasoned assumption proved to be wrong, of course. Iraqi society collapsed, and with it the Army. The first of the charges against Rumsfeld is that he never responded to this chaos by sending enough U.S. troops to fill the security vacuum. Instead, he pressed ahead with his effort to hand power to some—any—new set of Iraqis as swiftly as possible. (At Rumsfeld's urging, Bush had given the Pentagon responsibility for postwar Iraq.) The mission Rumsfeld gave to Lt. Gen. Jay Garner—the first postinvasion civilian administrator in Iraq—was to cobble together some provisional Iraqi government. Convening versions of the Loya Jirgas that had worked well enough in Afghanistan, Garner was making good progress, though it was always clear that the minority Sunnis would remain the dominant faction.

Then President Bush dropped his bombshell. He sent Paul Bremer to Iraq with the mission of building a democratic society from scratch. In effect, Bush decreed a political revolution in Iraq—taking power from the ruling Sunnis and giving it to the despised Shia. It was never likely the Sunnis would accept this passively. Whether Bush realized it or not, a civil war was inevitable.

The real case against Rumsfeld, I think, is that he neither fought against nor adjusted to this new policy of his president. He accepted it publicly. But it was the antithesis of everything Rumsfeld believed Vietnam had taught about the limits of American power. So, in his subsequent decisions about Iraq, Rumsfeld continued in his determination to preserve the Army from a rerun of Vietnam. No, the commanders in Iraq shouldn't even ask for more troops. No, the Army wouldn't comply with Bremer's demands that it intervene against, for example, the firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. More troops were not the answer; nor could military power substitute for political negotiation.