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Known and Unknown. Gosh, it is a long book - 815 pages. Also, if you thought living through the Iraq War was long, the book makes it seem longer. The executive summary is that it is a complicated world and sometimes your best designs and intentions don't work.
Rumsfeld began his career as a naval aviator and found himself working for a Congressional office during the Eisenhower administration. He mined his political support and served four terms as Congressman for a Chicago district. As a harbinger of the trouble he would continually find himself in for the rest of his carrer, he worked for the Nixon administration. He was in the middle of the haphazard transformation from Nixon to Ford. As you recall, Ford was an unlikely President, following the resignations of Spiro Agnew and later, Richard M. Nixon. Rumsfeld describes Ford as a kind and compassionate man, just the person needed to heal the nation after the disgrace of Watergate. The Ford administration though, never had an opportunity to succeed. There is a lesson here - it is very difficult to fix an organization or project once things go bad. We witnessed that last summer in the Gulf of Mexico and note the difficulties of NASA's James Webb Telescope. (Obviously as well, Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Rumsfeld finished out Ford's presidency by becoming Secretary of Defense. Then he entered commercial business, first serving as Searle Company's CEO until selling it off to Monsanto, and then General Instrument. Don writes several times in defense of Dick Cheney, saying the nation has forgotten what a truly imperial vice president was like - Nelson Rockefeller, who became Ford's VP. He writes that Dick Cheney is incredibly brilliant and with a keen sense of humor, not the manipulative shark that is painted by the media.
Fast forward then to Rumsfeld becoming Bush's Secretary of Defense. Don was in his Pentagon office when the hijacked plane struck the building on 9-11. The fog of war began. He writes that he was never able to properly articulate the response to terrorism. With a war, there are boundaries and eventual closure. Terrorism is very different, because as a terrorist sent a message to Margaret Thatcher after a narrow-miss on assassination - "We only have to be lucky once - you have to be lucky every time." Rumsfeld uses this axiom to explain that we cannot just be defensive with terrorism. We must not allow them the time or preparation to 'get lucky'. We must keep them on the move, or else they will have successes such as 9-11. He also claims the U.S. has been successful in its response to terrorism. In the immediate days following 9-11, no public official would have ever believed the U.S. would escape ten continuous years without another terrorist success - yet we have.
I agree with Rumsfeld that too many have selective memory concerning the decision to attack Iraq. There was both Congressional and International support of the initial decision to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction. Similar to Adlai Stevenson's Cuban Missile Crisis presentation, Colin Powell did the same for the Iraq evidence at the United Nations. The weapons of mass destruction were never discovered - it was a massive intelligence failure, not just on the part of the U.S., but the entire world.
Then the U.S. quickly subdued the Iraqi army, which was about the same size as the U.S. army. What went wrong was reconstruction. This was not another Vietnam - we never got this far with Vietnam. In hindsight, Don suggests two large blunders - a) dismissal of the Iraqi army, and b) delaying immediate government turnover to the Iraqis. Paul Bremer was assigned responsibility for the reconstruction, not the Secretary of Defense. As we know, things went badly, and members of the Bush administration became frustrated with each other. But sheesh - in the end, the Iraqis have to want it for themselves.
Rumsfeld discusses lawfare, which is the use of legal methods to slow down the response of western civilization. He notes that the DoD has over 10,000 lawyers, who are required to advise the decision makers of the Department of Defense continually over the slightest action. The U.S. had less legal trouble with 400,000 German POWs than 140 inmates at Guantanamo Bay. On the latter, he writes that it was just another horribly wrong thing in the Iraq morass. Besides the pictures of the POWs, there were also completely inappropriate pictures of Americans on Americans. The security contingent at Guantanamo was just completely amok - it was not the administration attempting to improperly treat the POWs.
Something else to think about - this lawfare. Western preoccupation with due process and laws can permit small nations and organizations to unduly influence the future of the U.S. Suppose a legal challenge to a new nuclear power plant is secretly funded by an adversary? (My extrapolation.)
Then as if Iraq wasn't enough by itself, the U.S. had to return its attention to Afghanistan. Don writes the DoD has studied the lessons of the Russians in Afghanistan, but the problem remains, what do you do about it? We cannot permit terrorists to plan and train casually without risk. Otherwise the terrorists will enjoy a succession of successes. It is a problem that goes beyond the responsibility of the U.S.
Yet the rest of the world wants the U.S. to bear the burden. Rumsfeld tells about attempting to solicit South Korean participation, only to hear the response, "Why should Koreans send their young men and women halfway around the globe to be killed or wounded in Iraq?" He pointed out the window to the bright lights of the South Korean city and said, "Why should Americans have sent their young men and women halfway around the world to Korea some fifty years ago?"
Mmm. As I described earlier, it is a long book. I think that Donald Rumsfeld is a brilliant man who did the best he could when everything was going wrong outside of his control. I don't believe that he will be as haunted by his decisions as Robert McNamara.
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