Rowan Scarborough - Rumsfelds War: The Untold Story of Americas Anti-Terrorist Commander
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Rumsfelds War: The Untold Story of Americas Anti-Terrorist Commander: summary, description and annotation
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Not since Robert McNamara has a secretary of defense been so hated by the military and derided by the public, yet played such a critical role in national security policywith such disastrous results.
Donald Rumsfeld was a natural for secretary of defense, a position hed already occupied once before. He was smart. He worked hard. He was skeptical of the status quo in military affairs and dedicated to high-tech innovations. He seemed the right man at the right time-but history was to prove otherwise.
Now Dale Herspring, a political conservative and lifelong Republican, offers a nonpartisan assessment of Rumsfelds impact on the U.S. military establishment from 2001 to 2006, focusing especially on the Iraq War-from the decision to invade through the development and execution of operational strategy and the enormous failures associated with the postwar reconstruction of Iraq.
Extending the critique of civil-military relations he began in The Pentagon and the Presidency, Herspring highlights the relationship between the secretary and senior military leadership, showing how Rumsfeld and a handful of advisersnotably Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feithmanipulated intelligence and often ignored the military in order to implement their policies. And he demonstrates that the secretarys domineering leadership style and trademark arrogance undermined his vision for both military transformation and Iraq.
Herspring shows that, contrary to his public deference to the generals, Rumsfeld dictated strategy and operationssometimes even tacticsto prove his transformation theories. He signed off on abolishing the Iraqi army, famously refused to see the need for a counterinsurgency plan, and seemed more than willing to tolerate the torture of prisoners. Meanwhile, the military became demoralized and junior officers left in droves.
Rumsfelds Wars revisits and reignites the concept of arrogance of power, once associated with our dogged failure to understand the true nature of a tragic war in Southeast Asia. It provides further evidence that success in military affairs is hard to achieve without mutual respect between civilian authorities and military leadersand offers a definitive case study in how not to run the office of secretary of defense.
Donald Rumsfeld was a natural for secretary of defense, a position hed already occupied once before. He was smart. He worked hard. He was skeptical of the status quo in military affairs and dedicated to high-tech innovations. He seemed the right man at the right time-but history was to prove otherwise.
Now Dale Herspring, a political conservative and lifelong Republican, offers a nonpartisan assessment of Rumsfelds impact on the U.S. military establishment from 2001 to 2006, focusing especially on the Iraq War-from the decision to invade through the development and execution of operational strategy and the enormous failures associated with the postwar reconstruction of Iraq.
Extending the critique of civil-military relations he began in The Pentagon and the Presidency, Herspring highlights the relationship between the secretary and senior military leadership, showing how Rumsfeld and a handful of advisersnotably Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feithmanipulated intelligence and often ignored the military in order to implement their policies. And he demonstrates that the secretarys domineering leadership style and trademark arrogance undermined his vision for both military transformation and Iraq.
Herspring shows that, contrary to his public deference to the generals, Rumsfeld dictated strategy and operationssometimes even tacticsto prove his transformation theories. He signed off on abolishing the Iraqi army, famously refused to see the need for a counterinsurgency plan, and seemed more than willing to tolerate the torture of prisoners. Meanwhile, the military became demoralized and junior officers left in droves.
Rumsfelds Wars revisits and reignites the concept of arrogance of power, once associated with our dogged failure to understand the true nature of a tragic war in Southeast Asia. It provides further evidence that success in military affairs is hard to achieve without mutual respect between civilian authorities and military leadersand offers a definitive case study in how not to run the office of secretary of defense.
Rowan Scarborough: author's other books
Who wrote Rumsfelds War: The Untold Story of Americas Anti-Terrorist Commander? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Rowan Scarborough
Christopher C. Miller
Bob Woodward
Dale R. Herspring
James Lilley
Dale R. Herspring
Cockburn Andrew
Donald Rumsfeld
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Table of Contents
To my late parents, Rowan and Katherine
[ INTRODUCTION ]
IN LATE SUMMER 1992, I TRAVELED T0 TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA, HOME T0 the Marine Corps sprawling desert training venue. I was researching a story for the Washington Times on future military missions in the post-Cold War world. The 170,000-member Corps serves as the nations expeditionary force. Marines onboard helicopter-carrying assault carriers are Americas on-call force to put boots on the ground. These rapid deployment capabilities were increasingly important after the Soviet collapse and Americas involvement in peacekeeping hot spots like Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.
My tour of Twentynine Palms took me to several mock operations centers where war gaming was underway. In one room, Marines had painted dark blobs where a new enemy was emerging: Muslim fundamentalists. We need to know, frankly, what the pillars of Islam are, which arent bad when you read them, then-Major General Harry Jenkins, director of Marine Corps intelligence, told me. But certain groups that carry those kinds of things to the extreme, and like to throw bombs, assassinate people and get into those kinds of activities or take on embassies. We have to be kind of concerned and be prepared to deal with it. The Marines knew firsthand. They suffered Americas first mass casualties at the hands of Muslim fanatics in 1983, when a truck bomb killed 242 personnel in Lebanon.
The military clearly had the right future threat in mindlong before many others did. But over the next eight years, as Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda terror network expanded and became more deadly, the American armed forces were largely kept on the sidelines by a Clinton administration more interested in peacekeeping than in terrorist-fighting.
When al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing twelve Americans among 257 dead, President Clinton responded by ordering cruise missile attacks. Sixty Tomahawks hit bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan in a safe, arms-length attempt to kill the terror master. Simultaneously, Navy missiles destroyed a suspected chemical weapons plant in Khartoum, Sudan. Neither assault succeeded. The terror master was not at home when the missiles hit, and at best the target was a civilian-military dual-use facility that did produce legitimate pharmaceutical products.
Two years later, when al Qaeda suicide terrorists bombed the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen harbor, killing seventeen sailors, the Clinton administration handled the attack as a Justice Department matter. The Coleits hull torn open, its sailors killed and woundedwas a crime scene, not a battle zone.
Bin Laden had made his intentions clear in 1998, before the Cole and embassy attacks. He issued a fatwa (traditionally a religious order from a prominent Islamic figure) brazenly declaring war on America and urging his followers to kill us everywhere.
By Gods leave, he said in a declaration published February 23,1998, in the Arabic newspaper al Quds al Arabi, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey Gods command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise, we call on the Muslim ulema [authorities on Islamic law] and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan.
Not until September 11, 2001, did the nation wake up. President Bush declared a war on terrorism that goes on today and will likely last into the next decade. A senior Pentagon official conceded to me, I hate to say this and would never say this in public, but 9-11 had its benefits. We never would have gone into Afghanistan and started this war without it. There just was not the national will.
In this global war against Islamist terror, the Pentagon is not fighting a foreign country with fixed leaders and infrastructure per se (though the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq have been struck down as accomplices to terrorism). The enemy in this war is mobile, well funded, and exists in terrorist cells spread around the world. In some cases, our enemies can be defeated with advanced jet fighters, ships, and tanksas was shown in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in most theaters, the Pentagon must find ways to penetrate the shadows, to find terror operators one by one. In this new war, our targets are individual people, their communications network, and their money.
ENTER RUMSFELD
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime national security figure in Republican circles, returned to government with the election of President George W. Bush. He was then sixty-eight years old and had enjoyed a twenty-five-year corporate career. He arrived in Washington not to wage a global war, but to lead a bureaucratic reformation that would shift the armed forces from a Cold War military to a lighter, suppler organization. It was not a terribly high-profile mission. But Islamic terror turned Rumsfeld into an accidental war secretary, and he quickly emerged as a powerful leadercolorful, demanding, and dismissive of critics in the press as well as in the administration. His intellect and energy are legendary. He can conduct a three-day, eight-nation tour and get off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base looking as fresh as when he left. I work long hours, he once said. I like to work long hours.
This book tells the story of how the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon made crucial decisions in repositioning the 1.4 million-member active duty force to fight the new war on terror. I write of important, and often previously unreported, debates within the administration over the role of special operations forces, whether to pay ransom for hostages, what to do with captured al Qaeda terrorists, and who should run the warthe White House or the Pentagon. I also, to establish a point of comparison, look at how President Clinton usedor more often didnt usethe military to fight al Qaeda during its astonishing rise in the 1990s.
Rumsfelds drive to succeed, his intellectual power, his insatiable appetite for work, and his willingness to fight bureaucratic wars all make him a unique figure in the modern history of American government. He has led the country in two major warsAfghanistan and Iraqwhile positioning the armed forces to fight a terrorist threat, the global dimensions of which are still unknown. History will surely judge him one of Americas most important defense leaders.
Rumsfeld burst out of the Eisenhower 1950s. He grew up solidly middle-class in Illinois, graduated from Princeton, flew Navy planes, got elected to Congress, ran the Pentagon, rescued a failing corporation and, at an age when most men are ready to retire, came back to take over the Pentagon one more time. He has run with the bulls in Pamplona and run with bulls on Wall Street. He is a championship wrestler, fierce squash player, and master of the one-handed pushup. He married his high school sweetheart and raised three children. His net worth is in the tens of millions. His friends and his wife call him Rummy. He has made friends on the political left and right. A longtime friend is CBS anchor Dan Rather, a consistent critic of Republicans and the Bush family. Rumsfeld confirmed to me in November 2003 through a spokesman that he co-owns a ranch with Rather. He later told
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