[DEBATE] : More political buffoon than military hardman

[Russell]

Friday 10 November 2006


Brendan O'Neill
More political buffoon than military hardman
Donald Rumsfeld has a lot to answer for. So do the neocons and commentators 
currently cheering his demise.

'Mark my words, this is a day in modern political history.. He was the 
architect and agent of almost everything that has crashed in America's Iraq 
policy. I can't tell if he has been sacked or resigned, but this place has 
gone mad.'
So wrote a hyper Jon Snow on Donald Rumsfeld's resignation in Wednesday's 
'Snowmail', his daily bulletin of what's coming up in Channel 4 News which 
doubles up as a kind of psychological profile of Britain's bicycle-riding, 
Guardian-reading 'pinko liberals' (how Snow once described himself). Snow's 
latest missive suggests that some pinko liberals think - or rather 
fantasise - that the hanging-out-to-dry of Rumsfeld post-mid-terms is a 
political earthquake (or a 'political coup', in Snow's words) after which 
nothing will be the same again. Get a grip.
Rumsfeld has been turned into a scapegoat for Iraq - by President Bush, by 
various neocons who supported the war but then changed their minds, and by 
anti-war commentators like Snow who seriously imagine that the war and 
occupation came about by Rumsfeld's own volition or sense of vengeance. All 
of this underestimates the powerful political malaise among the American 
elite that makes it turn to the international arena in search of a moral 
boost, and lets off the hook the various thinkers, officials and statesmen - 
both American and British - who cheer-led and devised the disastrous 
invasion.
Rumsfeld certainly has a lot to answer for. He was often talked about as the 
hardman of the Bush administration, the unflinching, cocksure defence 
secretary who wouldn't let anyone stand in the way of his grand war plans. 
In fact, he summed up the bumbling idiocy of the Bush-led Republicans, and 
the extent to which they were a lame-duck party, bereft of vision or 
resolve, long before they lost control of both Houses of Congress this week.
Looking back at Rummy's plans for Iraq, there's little evidence that he was, 
as one American commentator argued after his resignation, 'the grandmaster 
of American expansionism', a kind of contemporary Alexander. In fact, he 
planned a risk-free, quickfire, media-orientated invasion of Iraq that he 
hoped would make America look cool and purposeful in the eyes of the world 
without requiring too much hard graft. It was the political equivalent of 
boys playing with toy soldiers.
Rumsfeld's 'grandmaster plan' for Iraq included launching a massive 72-hour 
bombardment - 'shock and awe', or a 'blitzkrieg' as one US military official 
described it - which he hoped would literally shock and overawe the Ba'athists 
into surrendering. As the LA Times reported, the US military was seeking to 
'defeat Saddam Hussein with "effects" rather than the physical destruction 
of enemy troops or their resources'. After these 'effects' had done the hard 
task of making the enemy magically evaporate, Rumsfeld and Co planned to 
send US troops over the border into Basra where they would apparently be 
greeted by cheering crowds readying garlands to put around the soldiers' 
thick necks. This was about creating the right media image of modern-day 
America, as one newspaper reported in March 2003: 'Officials say they are 
aiming for a rapid and benign occupation of Basra that results in 
flag-waving crowds hugging British and American soldiers - all of which 
would create an immediate positive image of American and British war aims 
while undermining Iraqi resistance elsewhere in the country.' (1)
Rumsfeld's was not some secret and dastardly plan to take over the Middle 
East whatever the cost to American soldiers or Iraqi civilians. Rather it 
was a fantasy war of liberation designed for the front pages of the papers. 
As I argued on spiked a week before the war began in March 2003: 'America is 
hoping for a war without risk, using massive bombardments, special effects 
and plain old wishful thinking to compensate for traditional military 
engagement.' (See Military disengagement, by Brendan O'Neill.) Rumsfeld was 
less a political hardman than a political fantasist - and everything that 
has gone wrong in Iraq since is a consequence of that old devil called 
reality getting in the way of the fantasy.
It should be remembered, however, that many of those now slating him and 
cheering his demise shared in his fantasies - not only his military fantasy 
of a quick and clean war, but also the bigger political fantasy that America 
is a liberating force on a white charger with a right and responsibility to 
topple tinpot tyrannies from Afghanistan to Iraq.
The leading military men in America who have turned against Rumsfeld went 
along with his plans for a short, sharp 'war of liberation'. They especially 
liked the idea of having images of Iraqis high-fiving US soldiers 'beamed to 
a sceptical world'. As Major Chris Hughes of the US Marine Corps said in 
2003: 'The first image of this war will define the conflict.' (2) Over the 
past three years, this agreement over Iraq has descended into a spat between 
leading military officials and Rumsfeld's department about the planning and 
political ownership of the war, and now military officials are trying to pin 
all the blame for Iraq on one man: Rumsfeld.
If Rumsfeld was initially physically backed by military men, he was also 
morally cheered on by various neocon thinkers and politicians. Yet now, as 
Vanity Fair revealed this month, in a feature titled 'Neo Culpa', these 
'neoconservative boosters' of the war in Iraq are turning on President Bush 
and Rumsfeld and arguing that 'their grand designs [for the Middle East] 
have been undermined by White House incompetence' (3). In truth, the 
incompetence was written into the neocons' designs. It is not that invading 
Iraq was a good plan but Bush and Rumsfeld executed it badly; rather, the 
'grand design' of hurling a few bombs to topple Saddam in the belief that 
this would send a message to the world about American values was fatally 
flawed from the outset and destined to end in disaster.
These neocon detractors have achieved the rather remarkable feat of making 
Rumsfeld look almost principled. At least in resigning he is taking some 
responsibility for Iraq, whereas they are shirking theirs. As for all those 
British commentators 'going mad' over Rummy's fall: they might look a bit 
closer to home for the origins of Rumsfeld's fantasy politics of war. It is 
well known that he was inspired by Tony Blair's words and actions over 
Kosovo in 1999. Rumsfeld's claim that America had the right to override Iraq's 
national sovereignty 'because the people there are suffering' comes from 
Blair's 'Chicago Doctrine'. In April 1999, Blair gave a speech at the 
Chicago Economic Club, in which he called for a decisive move away from the 
old UN emphasis on respecting nations' sovereign independence and towards 
more pro-active forms of military intervention to topple 'regimes that are 
undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts' (4). This heavily influenced 
both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration that followed.
Also, Rumsfeld's application of the precautionary principle to international 
affairs - as summed up, or not summed up as the case may be, in his widely 
ridiculed speech about fighting 'unknown unknowns' - comes straight from 
Blair's own elevation of risk-avoidance as a key justification for military 
action. Back in 2001, Blair said of foreign ventures: 'Whatever the dangers 
of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are often far, far greater.' 
(5) We can mock America's big dumb Donald, but we should at least admit that 
some of his war fantasies are very British in origin.
The idea that politics might return to normality, and even that there might 
be an end to war now that Rummy has gone, is also a fantasy. To argue that 
the Bush administration has lost its moral authority as a result of Iraq 
gets things the wrong way around; in fact, the Iraq war has its origins in 
America's loss of moral authority, in a powerful sense of political 
uncertainty and crisis. Rumsfeld may have been hung out to dry, but the 
American elite remains high and dry.