Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld

DONALD RUMSFELD COMES ALIVE IN BATTLE, WHICH MADE HIM A BRILLIANT ARCHITECT OF THE IRAQ WAR. BUT IS THE SHARP- ELBOWED FIGHTER READY FOR THE PEACE?

By Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson Monday, Dec. 29, 2003
    • WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY

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    Those questions are the biggest mystery of Rumsfeld's year. Part of the problem, ironically, was the brilliant war plan itself. Rumsfeld and Franks so stripped down the invasion force for speed that the occupation army that came out the other end was too small for the job of peacekeeping. The military suddenly found itself having to protect banks, arms dumps, even gas stations, with just a handful of divisions. But there were other problems too. Administration officials, including some close to Rumsfeld, were suffused with the convenient belief that Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as a liberator the moment G.I.s landed. The Pentagon, after almost two years of nonstop rivalry with other agencies, had become almost genetically incapable of--some said uninterested in--working with the State Department on anything Iraq related, including postwar planning, which was one of State's strengths.

    Rumsfeld would never admit that he made a mistake, says an aide, who adds, "That's a good thing when selling a policy or a war. But if the choice turns out to be wrong, he probably won't acknowledge it until it's turned into a disaster."

    Indeed, Rumsfeld answers the question of whether he misjudged the postwar challenges with a trademark Rumination. "Let me give you a perspective," he says. "You come into these jobs--there's not a lot of time for reflection--you better know two-thirds of the things you're gonna need to know when you get in here, 'cause you're not going to have time to learn three-quarters. You can learn an eighth or a quarter or a third, but you can't learn it all. And the same thing is true in a big, massive project like a war. You've got to get into as many of the key pieces, pick the right pieces that are most important and then pass them off to somebody."

    In this case, that somebody was Jay Garner, a retired three star Rumsfeld knew since the two had worked together studying U.S. space policy three years before. This was probably Rumsfeld's first misstep: giving a retired general the job of organizing postwar Iraq--a job in which Garner would have to compete for money and manpower with a dozen other active-duty four-star generals. Rumsfeld didn't have a lot of great options. The Pentagon doesn't have an agency for peacekeeping or nation building or anything in between, and neither the military nor the White House regarded those chores as terribly important. As a consequence, Garner's show was always a second-or third-order problem inside an institution that counts waging wars--and keeping its troops alive to fight them--its first 10 priorities.

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