"After 2 months on the job, it is clear that the Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain," he dictated. Distrust between Congress and the Defense Department was so great, he said, that "the maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late." Without changing and fixing the relationship with Congress, Rumsfeld concluded, "transformation of our armed forces is not possible."
This "Anchor Chain" memo became notorious among Rumsfeld's staff. It sounded like he had almost given up fixing the Pentagon during the George W. Bush presidency. The task was so hard and would take so long, he dictated, that "our job, therefore, is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield.
At an NSC meeting with the president, Rice began going through a long paper on the issues that everyone was supposed to have read and understood.
Rumsfeld leaned back and made it pretty clear he was not paying much attention. The president also seemed bored. But Rice plowed on.
"Don, what do you think about this?" Bush asked, interrupting Rice.
"They are bad guys," Rumsfeld said.
It was as if Rice and the NSC had one serious, formal process going on while the president and Rumsfeld had another one--informal, chatty and dominant.
The CIA stepped in to fill the void. They could bring to bear all the resources of the intelligence community, combined with US military power and Special Forces, harness the factional opposition known as the Northern Alliance, defeat the Taliban and close out the al Qaeda sanctuary.
Rumsfeld sat uneasily on the sidelines. At an NSC meeting on October 16, his frustration boiled over. "This is CIA's strategy," he declared. "They developed the strategy. We're just executing the strategy." Rumsfeld had been humiliated. Never again. The next month, when the president ordered him to look seriously at the Iraq war plan, Rumsfeld made it his personal project. This would be his.
An important contrast can be found in the 1991 Gulf War. Powell’s concept was “Go in big & end it quickly. We could not put the US through another Vietnam.“ The plan to use overwhelming force to guarantee victory became known as the Powell Doctrine.
In 2001, things were different. The two great Pentagon ideas--a new, ”refreshed“ Iraq war plan, as Rumsfeld called it, and military transformation--converged.
The point of the Iraq war plan was: Get to Baghdad, and fast. It echoed Rumsfeld’s desire--”assume risk.“ The Powell Doctrine of trying to guarantee success was out. Rapid, decisive warfare was in.
A level so high that the secretary of defense couldn’t turn it down? That could only mean Bush or conceivably Cheney.
In an interview later, Rumsfeld said he realized that "the Iraqi infrastructure had been neglected for decades. I went over and looked at an electric power plant. I can remember, it was being held together with chewing gum, bobby pins and baling wire. And I looked at [it] myself and said, My Lord, this took 30 years to get there." Saddam had ruled for over 30 years. "It's going to take 30 years to get out of here, to get that--not us out--for them to get back to looking like Kuwait or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or their neighbors. And I said, My goodness, that's going to be their job over a long period of time, because it just takes that long. You can't--and they have wealth. They've got water. They've got oil. They've got industrious people. They clearly are going to be the ones that are going to have to do that."
“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.
“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said. He cited the first order banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second order disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. Third, Garner said, was the summary dismissal of an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”
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The above quotations are from State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, by Bob Woodward. Click here for other excerpts from State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, by Bob Woodward. Click here for other excerpts by Donald Rumsfeld. Click here for a profile of Donald Rumsfeld.
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