Rumsfeld's Long List of Failures
By the normal standards of business or government, Donald Rumsfeld should long since have resigned or been fired as secretary of Defense.
The reason is not ideology, nor is it his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, horrifying though that may be. The reason is incompetence. His record in Iraq over the last 13 months is the most dramatically incompetent performance by a public official in recent American history.
United States forces entered Baghdad in triumph in April 2003. Today they cannot prevent an assassination on the doorstep of occupation headquarters. Insecurity roils the country. Six weeks before some uncertain form of sovereignty is to be turned over to an Iraqi regime, no one knows what that regime will be.
Rumsfeld is the man responsible. He sought and won the responsibility for postwar Iraq from President Bush. He and his aides tossed aside State Department studies on the difficulties to be expected. Rumsfeld relied for advice on Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who was wanted for fraud in Jordan and who provided what many have described as fraudulent intelligence. Chalabi and his organization got $39 million from the U.S. government until it finally, last week, stopped the gravy train.
The speed with which Iraq unraveled was stunning, beginning immediately after the military victory. Mobs looted Iraqi institutions -- and for two months, incredibly, U.S. forces did nothing effective to stop it. Every Iraqi government department except the oil ministry was looted. The great national museum and the national library were ransacked. Looters took beds from hospitals, computers from universities.
It was a disaster for the occupation that followed. Electricity and water supplies were hurt. But the psychological damage was worse. Iraqis saw the occupying forces as being grotesquely unprepared to provide elementary security. The U.S. has never recovered from that loss of confidence. Asked about the looting at the time, Rumsfeld dismissed it as "untidiness."
Rumsfeld's man in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, started out by disbanding the entire Iraqi army. The result was to leave hundreds of thousands of men on the street without income or dignity -- a recipe for resentment. Lately, under the pressure of growing nationalist resistance, Bremer has started trying to undo his folly and rehire some former soldiers. He dealt with the confrontation in Fallouja by turning security in that city over to Saddam Hussein's former officers.
