The War Against Rumsfeld
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has managed both to be targeted by the Bush administration's usual Democratic critics and to lose the support of some Republican senators and conservative pundits. They contend that the Iraq war has been prosecuted incompetently, with Rumsfeld bearing the major responsibility.
The attacks, of course, depend upon a fiction -- that a perfectly run, low-casualty war is always possible, as long as we have proper military leadership. If only that were so. Instead, waging war is unavoidably difficult, unpredictable and deadly. To think otherwise is certain to weaken public support for the use of force and therefore only undermines our ability to apply it when necessary.
The criticisms of Rumsfeld -- repeated so often that they have congealed almost into conventional wisdom -- feed the fiction. They are wrong, ahistorical and militarily ignorant.
Start with the argument that we went into Iraq with a military force too small for the job. Put aside that senior U.S. military commanders on the ground believed our force levels to be sufficient. As is the case in almost all wars, our ability to introduce more troops into the region was constrained by geographical, logistical and foreign policy considerations. Ankara's position on whether U.S. troops could be deployed from Turkey remained in flux until the last minute (the Turks ultimately said no), and staging additional troops out of Kuwait would have presented logistical problems. Meanwhile, with many of our regional allies remembering the inconclusive end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the more we delayed combat, the more we risked losing support, which would have derailed the enterprise.
There was an additional reason to go to war using the forces that had been assembled in the region -- we were able to achieve operational surprise against Saddam Hussein, who thought the United States, once deprived of the use of Turkey, would have to wait to move additional forces to the Gulf. This created a strategic advantage that led to the low combat casualty rates and greatly limited collateral damage during the initial invasion. Had U.S. commanders delayed the assault until a larger force could have been assembled, the war might have been launched under substantially more difficult and deadly circumstances.
