SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — In April 1862, after a bloody Union victory in the battle of Shiloh, critics who loathed the hard-drinking Gen. Ulysses S. Grant asked President Lincoln why he didn't fire his controversial general. "I can't spare this man," Lincoln is said to have responded, "he fights!"
The anecdote sheds light, a friend in the Pentagon tells me, on why Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has not moved quickly to remove Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the controversial deputy undersecretary for intelligence who in speaking at evangelical Christian churches has presented the fight against Islamic terrorists as a war between Christianity and Satan. Boykin is no politically correct, consensus-driven bureaucrat: He fights. "Do you want to win this war or not?" my friend, a Boykin admirer, asks.
It's certainly true that Boykin brings a warrior spirit and a strong sense of conviction to the terrorism fight. He told an Oregon congregation that the U.S. was under attack "because we're a Christian nation ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." Though government officials have moved to distance themselves from Boykin's comments, many can't help but admire his determination.
Rumsfeld's support for his general may or may not hold, depending on how the political winds blow. But it's not hard to see why the Defense secretary would like to see him stay. Rumsfeld is worried about how the war on terrorism is going, as shown by a Defense Department memo that was made public last week. More than one Defense Department official has said to me in the last week that special operations veteran Boykin, who has a fine military record, is "indispensable" to that war.
In his memo, the secretary prods his subordinates to think about new approaches and frets about whether the U.S. is "winning or losing the global war on terror." Rumsfeld asks whether a "new institution" that "seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies" on fighting terrorism should be created. That sounds a lot like what Boykin has been put in charge of.
But one of the other major themes in Rumsfeld's memo is a grand strategy question that is decidedly outside of the purview of the Defense Department: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" This suggests the questions that some at higher levels in the military have been asking for months: Is the military "war" enough? Can the United States really defeat terrorism one terrorist at a time? What else needs to be done to increase the standing of the United States in the Islamic world and neutralize extremism?
