Opinion Blame it on them all
Devoid of self-criticism,Donald Rumsfelds memoir is a breathing version of the man himself.
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So many to blame. So little space.
Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages including a scintillating List of Acronyms to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir,Known and Unknown,is like a living,breathing version of the man himself: very thorough,highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.
The 78-year-old Rumstud,as W. dubbed him,was both the youngest defence secretary in American history and the oldest. He traces a political career that spans a time when Lucy and Ricky were considered an interracial relationship,when Gerald Ford was fresh blood and when Richard Nixon still had a secret taping system.
Rummy met Dick Cheney when Cheney applied to be an intern in Rummys Congressional office,and they had many fine adventures,from figuring out how to keep the sun from shining on President Fords neck in the Oval Office to lowering American standards on torture.
The high school wrestling champ doesnt wrestle with self-doubt. Rummy begins ladling out rationalisations in the preface. The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognises that the information those in positions of responsibility in government,as well as in other human endeavours,have at their disposal is almost always incomplete, he writes. He quotes Clausewitz on the challenge of faulty intelligence and Socrates saying,I neither know nor think that I know.
When you think about it,it was really all the fault of his nemesis,George Herbert Walker Bush. Rummy writes how humiliating it was to run for president briefly in the 1988 Republican primary,with no money or name recognition,when front-runner Bush didnt bother to show up for their candidate forums. Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy,whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didnt have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein.
No doubt Rummy feels that if hed been a pedigreed scion instead of a working-class scholarship kid,he could have been president. And he wouldnt have made a hash of it,like some presidents he worked for. He wouldnt have had indistinct chains of authority or confused lines of responsibility or unrestricted flow charts or unresolved internal conflicts or a paucity of inter-agency meetings or most grievous of all,memos that were not read and acted upon.
There were those in the military who considered Rumsfeld the devil incarnate,and those in diplomacy who considered him more ruthless than any global despot. Rummy dismisses reports of his masterminding as inaccurate rumours.
W.,however,loved Rummys blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness. I was still surprised by Governor Bushs request to see me, Rummy writes about the president-elect. He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.
Starting on 9/11,Rummy pushed and manoeuvred to blame Saddam for 9/11 despite the lack of evidence.
He excoriates others as scheming infighters. He writes that,despite her affinity for W.,Condi was a bad NSC chief,forcing consensus rather than letting contentious issues get to the president.
He blames Colin Powell for posturing with the press and George Tenet for being so cocky about Saddams phantom WMD.
He even delicately blames the president,for not making incisive decisions at times on pressing matters and for not scheduling a high-level meeting on my proposals sent in a memo.
He says it was Tommy Franks who didnt want a lot of ground forces in Tora Bora,when Osama got away from us. He blames the generals for not telling him he needed more troops to secure Iraq as though he would have listened. He blames the Geneva Conventions drafters for not knowing detainees of modern asymmetrical wars would need rougher treatment. He blames the Supreme Court for its novel reasoning defending detainee rights.
He blames Katrina on…
Oh,never mind. You get the idea.
The New York Times
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