Donald Rumsfeld's pride went before his fall--and thousands of needless deaths

Date published: 6/21/2007

DONALD RUMSFELD gives Robert McNamara, chief architect of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam war policy, a good run for his money as worst U.S. defense secretary of modern times. Rumsfeld's competitiveness in this race is freshly illustrated in "Endgame," the newest episode of public television's unrivaled "Frontline" series.

The Middle East birthed the world's great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam. During the past 6 years Washington has produced lesser Gods of One, who believe that the world is as they say it is, or will be as soon as their divine breath falls on it. Regarding Iraq, the Bush presidency has contained three such deities--Mr. Bush himself, Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Rumsfeld, who likely has done the most harm to the nation through his willful mismanagement of the war.

How willful? "We didn't have a plan" for confronting an insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies tells "Frontline." To have had such a plan, in Mr. Rumsfeld's mind, would have been to mar the glorious victory for democracy he believed that the U.S.-led juggernaut would speedily win. "We never even considered an insurgency as a reasonable option," contritely confirms Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff who helped plan the takedown of Saddam.

In May 2004--13 months after Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed rampant looting, a dark harbinger of bloodier chaos, as part of freedom's "untidiness," and by which time car bombs had killed hundreds of Iraqis, the Marines had assaulted the murderers' lair of Fallujah, and Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite militia had taken to the warpath--occupation administrator Paul Bremer asked Mr. Rumsfeld--who denied the existence of an "insurgency" or a "civil war" long after these bloody outbreaks were obvious to a bright schoolboy--for 40,000 more troops. Request ignored.

Three months later, says Gen. Keane, there was still "no plan to defeat the insurgency." In fact, Mr. Rumsfeld's idea was for U.S. forces "to keep a light footprint," taking shelter in big bases and engaging the enemy only as a last resort. With the 2004 U.S. election pending, the secretary, fearful of heavy U.S. casualties, pinned responsibility for victory on the Iraq government, few of whose forces had been fully trained.

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Date published: 6/21/2007

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