"Any Old Changes Will Do"

Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn't working fast enough or well enough. S o maybe make some changes--apparently any old changes will do-- because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.


Somebody might claim that the Great Teacher of the Grand Old Party saw what a feeble performance old Don handed in on the required term paper and decided it was time to turn him out to pasture. Indeed, the New York Times story speculates in a factual void about whether Sec. Rumsfeld knew he was going to be fired when he wrote it. If he did, that was reason enough in itself for him to be "lackadaisical" about whatever deluge may come afterwards, when somebody a tenth as competent as Rumsfeld thinks Rumsfeld is -- i.e., anybody else alive at the moment -- gets to run the Pentagon.

He shouldn't take that attitude out loud , no doubt, he should try to look more like an adult and disinterested statesman for the sake of his Party -- to look like a Kissinger, as it were. But remember that when he wrote that term paper, it was supposed to be classified. The same thing happened last week to Mr. Stephen Hadley with that almost ludicrous "trip report" that the Bushies leaked out from under him without worrying about how bad it made one of their own look. (They have funny ideas about "loyalty," Bushies do, but don't let me get started about that.)

I'd guess (but it's pure guesswork) that Rumsfeld did not know he was going to be tossed off the sledge, however, mainly because of the tail end of one item:

Aggressively beef up the Iraqi MOD and MOI, and other Iraqi ministries critical to the success of the ISF — the Iraqi Ministries of Finance, Planning, Health, Criminal Justice, Prisons, etc. — by reaching out to U.S. military retirees and Reserve/National Guard volunteers (i.e., give up on trying to get other USG Departments to do it.)

That bit sounds more like what you'd expect from Son of McNamara, does it not? Why would DOD be better than any other department if it lost the whiz kid at the top? Lackadaisicality has its limits.

Probably he was only answering the essay question actually presented to him, which will not have been "What can we do different and better?" but more like "What can we talk about doing in public so that everybody is deceived into thinking that we might now do something different, and that way we get them off our backs while we nobly stay our course?" Mr. Rumsfeld may have thought it a bit beneath his unique dignity and greatness to be asked for mere P.R. advice of that nature and hastily scribbled down whatever came into his head in about ten minutes and turned it his paper, mistakenly assuming that nobody would ever judge him by it but his President. At the end of it he did make some slight attempt to please that audience of one, insofar as he seems rather less unserious about the "less attractive options" than about the rest, perhaps trying to point the moral that nothing really important should be put at risk for the sake of a persiflage campaign. All the negative points agree either with Mr. Bush's known prejudices or with those of General Abizaid or with both.

"Rumsfeld openly admits that he wants to run Iraq just like Saddam did" is not fair. It wasn't "openly" at all, it was classifièdly. As with Mr. Hadley, the motives for preparing the document had no necessary connection with the motives for leaking it. I rather suspect that that "senior Administration official" who instructed the Times how to spin the "trip report" was none other than Mr. Stephen Hadley himself, whereas it is inconceivable that Sec. Rumsfeld ever wanted this thing to appear in the papers at all.

Moreover, he certainly cannot have wanted to run Iraq on Ba‘thist lines in every respect. I presume he took the "let's bribe 'em to behave" idea from Mr. Hadley, or whoever else first invented it in Administration and GOP circles, not directly from Saddam, and that the latter's name is adduced only to show that bribery has in fact been known to work with Iraqis.

If the idea of bribing whole provinces as well as particular politicians is Rumsfeld's own extension of Hadley's brainstorm, it is the only thing in the memo that is originally Rumsfeldian.. I doubt this is the case, however, and assume that some of the invasionites have been canvassing the idea behind closed doors for a while now, even though today may be the first time it has turned up in the press. To corrupt a regime that one has oneself set in place is so outstandingly bad a plan that a whiz kid as bright as Rumsfeld is must see what's wrong with it in ten seconds -- even perhaps a Mr. Stephen Hadley in ten days or so. That point is no problem if we assume that neither of them presented "bribe 'em to behave" to Dubya as the thing to do, only as one example of the general sort of new and different thing that the Administration could insincerely pretend to be thinking about doing until the election results blow over and the ISG circus leaves town and the heat is off again.

In Hadley's case, buying foreigners up wholesale was the only item in sight that was more than verbally different from "stay the course," whereas Rumsfeld tossed in what JC calls " a lot of contradictory and not obviously effective policies" as well, but there is no reason to insult the poor man's memory by assuming he actually believed in such shoddy stuff.

Ethically unedifying and useless for the victims in Iraq as this GOP campaign of self-leakage and persiflage is, it will probably more or less work. People who know right from wrong, plus also a fair number of basic facts about the invasion and conquest and occupation, can hardly fail to see through this charade, but it is not aimed at them. The targeted audience is only too likely to think "Gee, they really are looking at new and different ideas! Maybe they'll get it right this time."

Worse, we Democrats can't do anything effective against it. It might be good partisan fun to have a well-briefed Congressional committee show up Mr. Stephen Hadley for the amazing ignoramus that he seems to be at public hearings in the spring, but such a production wouldn't cost him his job, and with Mr. Rumsfeld there won't be any opportunity for even that feeble and pointless satisfaction.

Worst of all, what happens next to the Iraqis? I presume there will be some swerve in the Crawfordites' ever zig-zag course. Proconsul Z. Khalilzad has probably failed sufficiently by now that they'll be requiring somebody fresh to think up an occupation policy for them. Who gets to be Bush's brain next? The ISG/CFR gentry have been unilaterally and preëmptively ruled out, that's one big goal of the persiflage campaign already attained. Who's left?