Donald Rumsfeld: the world's most dangerous man?

I respect Rumsfeld for his attempts to redesign the US Military to bring it into the 21st century against a lot of internal resistance to change, but my respect ends there.
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March 06, 2003
Donald Rumsfeld: the world's most dangerous man?
By Michael Gove - London Times

He had an hour on prime time British TV this week but Donald Rumsfeld, the leading hawk in the Bush administration, is not selling well in Europe. Our correspondent says a short and victorious war in Iraq will vindicate him

DONALD RUMSFELD ENJOYS telling a story about the precise moment after the September 11 attacks when he felt that the US military was at last adapting to a changed world. He told friends that he knew the top brass had begun to embrace the realities of 21st-century warfare when he was asked to sign a requisition form for saddles and stirrups.
For Rumsfeld this was the moment when the Pentagon bureaucracy stopped thinking about old wars and started planning for new ones. The military were recognising that a single soldier mounted on an old mule could become the most effective vehicle for projecting force, simply by travelling into a position on a Central Asian hill with local partisans and calling down airstrikes with pinpoint accuracy using a GPS device.

As the strategic thinker Edward Luttwak noted in the Times Literary Supplement last month, the speed of allied victory in Afghanistan was due, more than anything, to the ability of mounted US soldiers instantly to call in precision bombing raids that devastated the Taleban and awed the Northern Alliance. The first battle in the war on terror really was decided by a few Americans on a wild frontier, riding tall in the saddle and relying on the speed of their weaponry. It was a victory for cowboys.

Which is perhaps why Rumsfeld likes the story so much. The US Defence Secretary has come to enjoy a reputation as the guy in the Bush Administration who shoots straight from the hip. Whether it was briefing the press with crisp authority during the Afghan War, or dismissing France and Germany as "old Europe" during the diplomatic negotiations over the Iraq crisis, Rumsfeld unerringly hits the target. But that plain-spoken quickness on the draw has become, in the eyes of many in Europe, a liability in the struggle to keep the West together at a time of tension. Many Europeans now regard Rumsfeld as the epitome of the cowboy tendency in the US Government, those who rely on their guns to do the talking and yearn to see America operate as a Lone Ranger instead of playing by the rules of international diplomacy.

The belief that the cowboy tendency has failed in its task to round up a respectable enough posse to deal with Saddam Hussein has grown dramatically this week. Turkey's failure to support the deployment of US troops, the French insistence that they may veto a fresh UN resolution authorising action and Russia's grimly negative stance towards greater pressure being placed on Iraq all suggest that American diplomacy is faltering. And in the eyes of many, the man most to blame is the plain-spoken Rumsfeld.

Just last week the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, who backs Bush, told The Wall Street Journal that his task in winning round public opinion for action against Iraq would be easier if the world saw "a lot of Colin Powell and very little of Rumsfeld". When Europe's foreign and defence establishment met in Munich last month it was Rumsfeld who was in the firing line for barbed comments from the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer. Our own BBC's Sunday morning radio magazine Broadcasting House regularly makes sport of the US Defence Secretary with its "Donald Rumsfeld soundbite of the week".

The European consensus that Rumsfeld is an arrogant, clod-hopping, bellicose unilateralist who is responsible for placing the Western alliance under strain was wittily encapsulated by The Guardian's David McKie at the end of last month in his always-entertaining Smallweed column. McKie imagined Saddam Hussein asking for his dearest wish to be granted: "Let me have a man in the heart of the enemy camp who is arrogant, supercilious and smirking; let him treat those people and countries which dare to disagree with him as if they were lesser breeds beyond the law; let him demonstrate in such dealings the masterly diplomatic finesse of a Richard Littlejohn and the delicate sensibility of a Mark Steyn; and let him be called Ronald Dumsfeld. He didn't get the last part of his wish, though, did he?"

It is undeniable that McKie has articulated a widespread perception of Rumsfeld as the Nicholas Ridley of Bush's team, the ideologue who most effectively gets under European skin. And suspicion towards Rumsfeld is not restricted to this side of the Atlantic. In Bob Woodward's instant history of America's fight against terror, Bush at War, it is the smooth multilateralist Colin Powell who gets the good reviews while Rumsfeld's team at the Pentagon are painted as difficult and cranky mountain men hiding from diplomacy in a cave of reaction. If you believe fashionable opinion, then the biggest loser so far in America's war has been Donald Rumsfeld.

But, not for the first time, fashionable opinion is wrong. It is fatal to underestimate Rumsfeld, a former university wrestler and Beltway insider since the Seventies. In his brilliant insider account of the Bush presidency, The Right Man, the former White House speechwriter David Frum gives Rumsfeld the highest marks for intelligence of anyone in the US Cabinet. That intelligence has been the driving force behind the remaking of American defence strategy to adjust to a post Cold War world.

Along the way, those generals who have risen to senior positions in the Pentagon by playing positional games during the Clinton years and going with the politically-correct flow have had their medals ruffled. Officers whose main talent lay in working with the grain of conventional wisdom have been forced to think afresh, and some have not been up to the challenge. These generals have found themselves in the same position as the mandarins who were in place at the Treasury when Nigel Lawson breezed into office. Brains used to accomodating themselves to years of decline have suddenly been forced to think afresh by an original intellect.

The same intellectual self-confidence that allowed Lawson to see off the wiseacres who rubbished "monetarism" helps Rumsfeld frame a witty and assured response to his critics. He knows that that his enemies will not be placated by gestures, they will be satisfied only by his failure. So he means to win. And when it comes to the crunch, so far he has.

In so far as the war on terror has been successful up to now, that's been due to Donald Rumsfeld and despite Colin Powell.

Indeed, the reason why Saddam Hussein is still in power in Baghdad, and the current crisis is unresolved, has a lot do with the failure of the Powell way of doing things and the reluctance of America to do things the Rumsfeld way in 1991.

With the benefit of hindsight, victory in the first round of the war on terror, against the Taleban, looks as though it was always going to be a walkover. But the defeat of the Taleban only happened after another battle had been fought ?- between Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Powell's State Department.

In the early stages of squaring up to Afghanistan Powell was pushing what became known as a "Southern strategy". He and the State Department distrusted the Northern Alliance and wanted to placate General Musharraf's Pakistan by putting together a Pashtun coalition from the south of Afghanistan acceptable to Musharraf. Powell's team sought to soft-pedal attacks on Taleban positions and agreed with Musharraf that "moderate" members of the Taleban whom Pakistan had backed in the past might form part of a new Afghan administration.

While Powell's team was pursuing this diplomatic route, putting the sensitivities of coalition partners ahead of the requirements of effective war-fighting, the Taleban and their al-Qaeda allies remained secure. It was only late in October, when Rumsfeld won the argument for direct US support of a Northern Alliance offensive, that the fight was taken to the Taleban and they crumbled. The speed of victory not only put al-Qaeda to flight and enabled the people of Afghanistan to emerge from tyranny, it also secured respect for American resolution and the anti-terror alliance itself.

The preference for allowing the coalition to define the mission, rather than vice-versa, has governed Colin Powell's way of operating in the past. The success of the first Gulf War owes a lot to Powell's generalship. But victory was marred by one mistake which haunts the world to this day ?- the decision to leave Saddam in power at the end of the conflict. That judgement was made out of deference to the Allies, especially the Arab powers, who had been assembled to help liberate Kuwait. Although it was clearly desirable to remove Saddam, and just such a course of action was pressed by the recently-resigned Margaret Thatcher, the Gulf War mission was defined by the wishes of the whole coalition. It was a lowest common denominator war. Which left a high risk tyrant in place.

During the build-up to action against Iraq this time Powell has, once again, sought to tailor American strategy to the wishes of America's allies. Along with Tony Blair, he was instrumental in persuading George Bush to seek UN approval for action against a regime which threatens US interests directly.

Rumsfeld has, throughout, placed a different emphasis on affairs. While the Secretary of Defence recognises that allies are indispensable, and values the commitment from countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates and Bulgaria, he believes that if you allow coalition-building to take precedence over victory you privilege a desirable means over a necessary end. Chasing the good opinion of allies nearly derailed victory in Afghanistan and eventually blighted what seemed at the time like a victory in the first Gulf War. If America now subordinates its policy to the whim of France or Germany it will find itself acting in their national interests, not its own; it will compromise the security of millions for the sake of Jacques Chirac's amour propre.

That belief explains why Rumsfeld can appear so high-handed when he talks of "old Europe". As he said last August: "It's less important to have unanimity than it is to be making the right decisions and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may seem lonesome."

There is something distinctively cowboyish about the use of that word lonesome. But if there is a cowboy that Donald Rumsfeld really resembles it is the Gary Cooper of High Noon, the sheriff who won't allow the fears of others to prevent him doing what he knows to be right for their protection.

The real test for Rumsfeld will be what happens when the shooting starts. If his remaking of the US military, and his insistence on fresh strategic thinking, leads to swift victory, then he will be vindicated. If the war in Iraq gets bogged down then the vultures will begin to circle: those in the US military he has shaken up, those in the State Department he has argued against, those in Europe he has clashed with.

Donald Rumsfeld may be on a lonesome road. But he won't worry if it takes him quickly to Baghdad.