The Democratic Case for Rumsfeld

I realize fully that I may be among the last Dems standing who can find a kind word for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Still, I press on. Thomas P.M. Barnett offers up as good a profile that offers, I think, numerous reasons why Rummy deserves a more favorable look from all involved (left, right and center). And I'm not just saying that because Barnett gives me yet another reason to pick up a magazine with a pretty girl on the cover instead of yet another dour issue of The Economist or Newsweek or *sigh* Foreign Affairs.

My own biases, to start with: At some point back in the 80s, I read more than a healthy amount of literature on the then-ascendant military reform movement. This preceded the end of the Cold War and had luminaries such as Gary Hart, Sam Nunn, and Newt Gingrich as it's disciples. Hart managed to write the most on the topic back in the day, Nunn managed to get a good chunk of legislation passed to deal with needed reforms, and Gingrich was rather tight with a former Congressmember named Rumsfeld (who has also had his name attached to some of the 80s variants of this movement). The impetus then, is about the same that Barnett describes Rummy covering today:

"Defense transformation" was the train already leaving the station by the time Rumsfeld was sworn in on January 20, 2001. Trapped in cold-war thinking and armed with contingency plans that had not been reviewed for years, sometimes decades, the Pentagon spent the 1990s scrambling from one overseas crisis intervention to another, in the process piling up mountains of "supplementals," or ad hoc requests for additional funding from Congress to cover unexpected operations. As one of Rumsfeld's senior aides, Pete Geren, told me in 2002, "When your 'crisis response' lasts several thousand days, it stops being a crisis and starts being a feature of your strategic landscape."

So transformation was a "mature debate," as they say in the Building, but for Rumsfeld it was too far tilted in the direction of high-tech weaponry rather than changes in "tactics, techniques, and procedures," which is a favorite military phrase of his.

These are long overdue transformations that, I think, anyone of any ideology should applaud and encourage. But there's been a shortage of people who can effectively bring about the necessary changes that Rumsfeld has brought to the Pentagon. To be sure, there's still those nagging issues that make this a complicated case ... Rumsfeld's fingerprints on the Abu Ghraib scandal, his insistence on pushing down the number of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. Support for the very effective way in which Rumsfeld is establishing civilian control over the military (again ... why is THAT, in particular, NOT something more Dems are taking note of?) is not without a list of demerits in the other column.

So, I guess, when we judge on the balance, it might be beneficial to note that there isn't a perfect option here. It's an argument that has the words "faults and all" plastered throughout the case. Yes, there may well be someone very capable at completing the transformations much as Rummy is on pace for yet holds a tighter reign on the negatives that Rummy carries. But it might be instructive to look back to 1992 for an analogy. Les Aspin was about as well-qualified for the role of SecDef as any party could have put forth. But even he screwed up in Somalia and rightly tendered his resignation, which Clinton rightly accepted. Lesson being, sometimes the apparent perfection of a certain alternative cannot paper over the imperfections that come with executing any complex endeavor (like, say, being SecDef).

Barnett gives a profile that offers some light on the positives that Rumsfeld brings to the Pentagon, in my mind. Read it and take from it what you will. For me, though ... it's a fairly good review of the good things Rumsfeld has brought to the job.