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Sunday, January 14, 2007

Afterword--Rumsfeld redux

Yesterday's post, dealing at length with the plans for more troops in Iraq, appears below. In it, I pointed out (as no one else seems to have) that the new plan almost exactly follows Stephen Hadley's famous memorandum of early November, which called for filling the "five-brigade gap" in Baghdad in order to give Prime Minister Maliki the courage to assert his leadership and change his policies. But another thought occurred to me while tramping on the Appalachian trail this morning: that it is entirely possible that Donald Rumsfeld was eased out because he refused to authorize more troops for Iraq. Bob Woodward's book reported many occasions on which Rumsfeld insisted that the Iraqis had to manage their affairs themselves, and he must have had some idea of the damage the war is doing to the military. Robert Gates apparently had to commit himself to success in Iraq in order to replace him. This raises an ironic parallel with Robert McNamara, who was eased out in late 1967 because he no longer believed in the Vietnam conflict--even though few, in any observers realized that at the time. Rumsfeld certainly deserved to go, but he may ironically have been standing in the way of escalation in Iraq.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi David,

Hope the trek was good!

I think thats an interesting idea - but in the end I believe that Rumsfeld's departure was driven more by appeasment (to the electoral defeat) and IMO by the fact that, with an incoming Democratic Congress, while the administration won't give an inch on its goals (executive privalege) that the 'optics' of Rumsfeld before oversite committees was too much to accept.

Simply his personality and his visage both would have made going forward impossible - he was used to barking at Congress/media/etc. and couldn't take the lashing that administration flunkies increasingly will over the next two years.

John Measor

Nur-al-Cubicle said...

Prof Kaiser:

I thought Rumsfeld was eased out also, but because he was too chummy and sympathetic with some of the unhappier generals...personal bonds do form...and Bush didn't want a Secretary of Defense carrying a brief for discontent at the top

Strangely, I had a dream that I was at a cocktail party and struck up a conversation with Gates. I asked him why he was selected and if he represented a shift in thinking by the administration. He broke into a broad grin, and said: "No change, Nur, but the President likes my smile".