[L-I] Rumsfeld's Pentagon Papers

http://slate.msn.com/id/2090250/

Slate   October 23, 2003

Rumsfeld's Pentagon Papers

His leaked memo is the most astonishing document of this war so far.

By Fred Kaplan

Donald Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo
[www.usatoday.com/news/washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm]-which was
leaked to USA Today on Wednesday and picked up by the rest of the media, for
the most part with a shrug, on Thursday-may be the most important, even
stunning official document yet to come out of this war.

It puts the lie to the Bush administration's PR campaign that postwar Iraq
is progressing nicely and that the media are exaggerating the setbacks. (If
the media are exaggerating, this memo indicates, then so, too, is Secretary
Rumsfeld.) It reads eerily like some internal mid-'60s document from The
Pentagon Papers that spelled out how badly things were going in Vietnam
(just as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert
McNamara, were publicly proclaiming tunnel light and victories). To use a
phrase coined during LBJ's tenure to describe the ever-widening fissure
between rhetoric and reality, Rumsfeld's memo marks the first unconcealable
eruption of a "credibility gap" in the wartime presidency of George W. Bush.


The two-page memo, dated Oct. 16, was addressed to Rumsfeld's top aides: the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers; the vice
chairman, Gen. Pete Pace; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; and
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Here are some key passages:

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in
one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

"My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves [in the war on
terrorism]."

"We are having mixed results with [tracking down] Al-Qaida. . With respect
to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started."

"It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the
global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new
institution either within DoD or elsewhere."

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war
on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are
recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

"Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next
generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a
long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to
stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions
against the terrorists' costs of millions."

"How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our
current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get'? ...
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more
moderate course?"

Another question might be added to this list: Have you ever read a more
pathetic federal document in your life? What is being stated here can be
summed up as follows: We'll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq
(or, more precisely, it's "pretty clear" we "can win" it, "in one way or
another" after "a long, hard slog"), but we're losing the struggle for
hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we
don't know how to measure winning or losing, we don't have a plan for
winning it, we don't know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic
agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be
inherently incapable of doing so.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, when asked Wednesday about the
leaked memo, tried to put the best spin on it, extolling the quality of
questions that Rumsfeld had posed in the memo. "That's exactly what a strong
and capable secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing,"
McClellan said with a remarkably straight face.

Maybe so, but it's a shame Rumsfeld and his crew-who, after all, have been
running this operation-weren't asking such questions two years ago or five
months ago or, for that matter, five weeks ago. His questions about the
madrasahs-the schools where fundamentalist clerics indoctrinate the next
generation of Muslims in anti-Western militancy-are truly cogent. But he
seems unaware that his current style of neutralizing these institutions may
be heightening their appeal in the region's most susceptible quarters. What
to do about this cultural dimension of the war is a genuine dilemma, perhaps
the crucial dilemma of our time. But Rumsfeld's bull-session
recipes-creating a private foundation to entice moderation, drafting a "new
finding" for the CIA (which means what-an executive order that broadens the
scope of permissible assassinations?)-are thin brews.

What makes the Rumsfeld memo a major document, however, is that it confirms
much of the news reporting coming out of Iraq-the same reporting that Bush
officials (including Rumsfeld) have publicly derided as biased. NPR's
Deborah Amos reported Wednesday morning that Donald Evans, Bush's secretary
of commerce, came to Baghdad recently and admonished the American reporters
there to start paying more attention to the good news about the occupation.
"The American people have a far different view from the reality that we all
know is here," Amos quoted Evans as saying, "You should report what we're
really seeing." How long had Evans been in Iraq? About 24 hours. Where did
he sleep that night? In Kuwait.

Rumsfeld's memo makes plain that our top officials suffer no illusions about
the war. They are trying only to sell illusions to the rest of us. The
leaking of Rumsfeld's memo puts a tailspin on the sales pitch.



--
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
                            --Bertolt Brecht



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