In response to my query about whether there is a good history available of how the military's JAG corps resisted the Bush administration's urgings to disregard the Geneva Conventions and other laws, retired Air Force Reserve Brig. Gen. Ed Rodriguez suggested reading chapter 12 of Charlie Savage's Takeover. So I did. It is quite good on the point that tensions between JAGs and their civilian overseers date back to Cheney's time as defense secretary.

But I still would like to read a history of the conflicts over interrogation and such over the last 10 years. I think the closest we come is parts of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. Also, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap had a good piece in the summer 2010 issue of Texas Tech Law Review. Yet I think there is space here for a narrative history, ideally by a lawyer, about this confrontation, which I suspect carried unexplored significance for military professionalism.

I haven't read Joseph Marguiles' Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, but one reader wrote in to say it covers this subject well. 

The Bush Administration's effort to suppress independent advice from military officers was worse than a crime, it was a strategic blunder. Good strategic decision-making comes from airing differences, not hiding them. Of course, once civilians make a decision, the military should salute smartly and execute with vigor -- as some Marine recruiters are now doing by actively recruiting gays.

Here also are some reading recommendations from the friendly folks at the Lawfare blog:

Read on

I know, I never expected to write that headline. But I have to give credit where it is due. I found former Vice President Cheney's memoir generally to be honest, and also better written than many similar books.

I had expected it to be a blamefest like other the memoirs of other Bush Administration hardliners, such as those by Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Tommy R. Franks, that throw out a lot of accusations, but rarely face up to their own mistakes. But Cheney addresses many of the problems and embarrassments of his life. He is clear-sighted about the failures of the 1991 Gulf War, writing that Saddam Hussein "was able to turn the fact that he had stood up to and survived a massive assault into a personal victory." (P. 224) He explains why he thought it necessary to take a moment on the Senate floor to tell Sen. Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He even walks us through how he happened to shoot a hunting buddy, and touches repeatedly on his two drunk driving arrests as a youth.

A big exception to the tone of reasonable self-examination is his treatment of his speech to the VFW Convention in August 2002, an event I consider to be as close as we came to having a declaration of war against Iraq. He discusses his speech, but skips its most memorable line, his argument-ending assertion that, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." This would be a far better and more memorable book if Cheney had seriously pondered how he could have been so wrong. I am not looking for an abject apology, but had hoped for at least a meliorative meditation.

(There is a pattern here: The bigger mistake, the less attention he pays to it. I've noticed this frequently in the military, where generals get fired for personal indiscretions but not for professional bumbling. I suggest we call it Yingling's Rule, for the observation by the lieutenant colonel of that name that nowadays a private who loses his rifle receives more punishment than a general who loses a war.)  

The real disappointment to me of the book is that it has little of interest to say about Iraq, and even less about Afghanistan. I get the impression that everyone in the Bush Administration decided around the fall of 2004 that it was someone else's problem. But again, one exception is the role Cheney took in the fall of 2006 to get the president to stop following the Joint Chiefs and get some outside advice about what to do, which resulted in what we call "the surge," but which really was a reorientation of the American relationship with warring Iraqi factions. Whatever you think of the original insane decision to invade Iraq, and whatever eventually happens there -- and I remain pessimistic -- the course Cheney and Bush took in Dec. 2006 and Jan. 2007 was, I think, the right thing to do. It took courage to split with their generals and listen to other voices, and to step up the American presence when many would have applauded simply leaving.     

I think Gen. Martin Dempsey really hit it out of the park in Tuesday's hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Here is his meditation on two of the big lessons he learned in Iraq.

So I would -- I would -- looking back on it, at least my own personal view about Iraq in 2003 was that Iraq had a particular problem, and it was a regime that was destabilizing in the region and that we should take action, that -- it was my recommendation that we should take action to change the dynamic inside of Iraq and that the region itself would become more stable. I'm not sure it turned out that way. I mean, it probably -- it is, but it didn't happen exactly as we intended it, and that's because I don't think we understood -- let me put it differently. I didn't understand the dynamic inside that country, particularly with regard to the various sects of Islam that fundamentally, on occasion, compete with each other for dominance in Islam, and so -- Shia, the Shia sect of Islam, the Sunni sect of Islam -- when we took the lid off of that, I think we learned some things that -- and I'm not sure we could have learned them any other way.

I don't know, I've reflected about that a lot, but I've learned that issues don't exist in isolation. They're always complex. And I've been scarred by rereading a quote from Einstein, who said if you have an hour to save the world, spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem and five minutes of it trying to solve it. And I think sometimes, in particular as a military culture, we don't have that ratio right. We tend to spend 55 minutes trying to -- how to solve the problem and five minutes understanding it. That's one of the big lessons for me in developing leaders for the future, not only in the Army but, if confirmed, in the joint force.

Another one is the degree to which military operations in particular, but probably all of them, have been decentralized. You know, you'll hear it called various things: decentralized, distributed operations, empowering the edge. Whatever we call it, we have pushed enormous capability, responsibility and authority to the edge, to captains and sergeants of all services. And yet our leader development paradigms really haven't changed very much. They are beginning to change, but I think that second lesson on the enormous responsibility that we put on our subordinates' shoulders has to be followed with a change in the way we prepare them to accept that responsibility.

I think those would be the two big lessons for me."

He also referred to H.R. McMaster as "probably our best brigadier general." Good for him.

I certainly don't agree with everything Francis Fukuyama writes, says, or does, but I have long admired him for his intellectual honesty and creativity. As a philosopher of politics and society, he roams the field and seems to be dedicating to saying what he thinks, without trimming it to fit ideology -- or even friends. Here he comments that, "All of the Kissinger-era realists have gone away, like Robert Zoellick, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft. Today, the party is just a wasteland. They are total amateurs on foreign policy."

He traces his split with the Republican Party to a specific event:

At an annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute in February 2004, Fukuyama sat listening first to a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney and then the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who declared a 'unipolar era' had begun, which, of course, the U.S. would lead. 'All of these people around me were cheering wildly,' Fukuyama remembers. But in his view, Iraq was fast becoming a blunder. 'All of my friends had taken leave of reality.'

Nah, she didn't like it.

There have been lots of harsh reviews of Donald Rumsfeld's book, but one of the best ran awhile back in the Wall Street Journal. In case you missed it: It is written by Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for President Reagan and Bush the elder, and boy does her prose have muzzle velocity.

"I like Donald Rumsfeld," she begins. She continues:

I've always thought he was a hard-working, intelligent man. I respected his life in public service at the highest and most demanding levels. So it was with some surprise that I found myself flinging his book against a wall in hopes I would break its stupid little spine...Known and Unknown, his memoir of his tumultuous time in government, is so bad it's news even a month after its debut. It takes a long time to read because there are a lot of words, most of them boring.

That's just her opening gambit. A few more choice samples:

--"Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection." [Tom: Mega-dittoes on both counts-I thought the book shoulda been titled Not My Fault.]

--" But the terrible thing about the Rumsfeld book, and there is no polite way to say this, is the half-baked nature of the thinking within it. The quality of analysis and understanding of history is so mediocre..."

--" You'd think, nearly a decade after the events of Tora Bora, that Mr. Rumsfeld would understand the extent of the error and the breadth of its implications. He does not. Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else-Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet...It is the great scandal of the wars of the Bush era that the U.S. government failed to get him [Osama bin Laden] and bring him to justice. It is the shame of this book that Don Rumsfeld lacks the brains to see it, or the guts to admit it."

Well said, m'am. I think she captures well the Donald Rumsfeld I covered at the Pentagon for six long years.

Still not persuaded? Here's Max Boot's take on the book and the man.

Few people know the ins and outs of the Bush Administration as well as the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who is flat-out disgusted with the evasions and elisions in Donald Rumsfeld's new book. Here he explains why:

By Bob Woodward
Best Defense guest columnist

On page 527 of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld recounts what he says was an exchange on Oct. 14, 2003 with Condoleezza Rice who was then Bush's national security adviser. She apologized for a flap over Iraq policy at the time.

You're failing," Rumsfeld said.

"Don, you've made mistakes in your long career," she replied.

"Yes, but I've tried to clean them up," he said.

Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.

The Iraq War is essential to the understanding of the Bush presidency and the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. In the book, Rumsfeld tries to push so much off on Bush. That is fair because Bush made the ultimate decisions. But the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires -- facts he has completely left out of his memoir.

For example, I reported in my 2004 book, Plan of Attack (p. 25), that at 2:40 p.m. on 9/11, with the smoke and dust still filling the Pentagon, according to the notes of two of Rumsfeld's top aides, Rumsfeld mused about whether to hit "S.H. @ same time," not only bin Laden. One note taker reaffirmed this in an interview with the 9/11 Commission, and said that "S.H." referred to Saddam Hussein. (p. 335 of Commission report, and p. 559 footnote 63). None of this is in Rumsfeld's book. But he does cite the aides' handwritten notes for other quotations he uses in his book to recount that day. (p. 343 of his book, and p. 759 notes 30, 31 and 32. The notes are of senior Rumsfeld aides Victoria Clarke and Stephen A. Cambone.)

On January 9, 2002, four months after 9/11, Dan Balz of The Washington Post and I interviewed Rumsfeld for a newspaper series on the Bush administration's response to 9/11. According to notes of the NSC, on September 12, the day after 9/11, Rumsfeld again raised Iraq saying, is there a need to address Iraq as well as bin Laden?

When Balz read this to Rumsfeld, he blew up. "I didn't say that," he said, maintaining that it was his aide Larry DiRita talking over his shoulder. His reaction was comic and we agreed to treat it as off the record. But Balz persisted and asked Rumsfeld what he was thinking.

"Yeah," Rumsfeld finally told us. "I wanted to make sure that -- I always ask myself, what's missing. It's easy for people to edit and make something slightly better. But the question is, what haven't we asked ourselves? So I do it all the time. I do it here, I do it in cabinet meetings or NSC meetings. It was a fair question."

"I don't have notes," Rumsfeld insisted. "I don't have any notes."  His memoir cites his personal handwritten notes dozens of time.

One of the important questions about the Iraq War has always been about when and who started the Iraq clock after 9/11. On page 425, Rumsfeld alleges that Bush on Sept 26, 2001 -- just 15 days after 9/11 -- called him to the Oval Office. "He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq..."  Rumsfeld provides no footnote for this scene.

When I interviewed Rumsfeld at his Pentagon office on Oct. 23, 2003, Rumsfeld had a different story. "I do not remember much about Iraq being discussed at all with the president or me or the NSC prior to when the president asked me to -- asked me what I thought of the Iraq contingency plan -- that I believe was November 21st of '01." He was confident of the date because six days later he went to talk with the combatant commander for the region, Gen. Tommy Franks. "And I would not have waited long from the president asking me."

White House records and President Bush's recent memoir, Decision Points, support the Nov. 21 date. "Two months after 9/11 I asked Don Rumsfeld to review the existing battle plans for Iraq," Bush wrote, placing the request in November 2001 (p. 234)

The question of the date is not just a matter of whether something occurred on a Monday or a Thursday. On Sept. 26, 2001, the Bush administration was focused on Afghanistan. The first CIA team had just entered and the bombing had not yet begun. By his own account Rumsfeld was intensely trying to figure out how to begin the military aspect of Afghanistan War with bombing and inserting Special Operations teams.  

At a Camp David meeting on Sept. 15 -- eleven days before Rumsfeld says Bush made his first Iraq war plan inquiry -- Bush rejected going after Iraq. In fact, Rumsfeld himself writes, that "at the September 15 NSC meeting at Camp David days earlier when Iraq had been raised he [Bush] had specifically kept the focus on Afghanistan." (p. 425)

According to Rumsfeld, on Sept. 21, he and General Franks "drove over to the White House to present his initial operational concept" for Afghanistan (p. 370) and a more detailed approach was given to Bush on Sept. 30 (p. 373). It is inconsistent with everything known that in the middle of all that planning and anguish over Afghanistan, Bush would raise Iraq on Sept. 26.

However, by Nov. 21, the United States had had unexpected success in Afghanistan and controlled half the territory. Thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters had fled the capital Kabul into Pakistan. If Bush were looking for another target -- and he clearly was -- that would be the time, not on Sept. 26.

Another key question: When did Bush finally decide to commit the United States to war? Rumsfeld writes, "Up until the very minute the president authorized the first strike [March 19, 2003] there was no moment when I felt with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided." He does describe a meeting Jan. 11, two months earlier, when he met at the White House with Cheney, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, and Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Rumsfeld quotes Cheney telling Bandar, "The president has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein." In his book Rumsfeld adds, "Of course, Bush would not irrevocably decide on war until he signed the execute order." (p. 450)

Read on

A friend recently asked me what I really had learned since 9/11, how my sense of the world had changed. That event and its consequences have so dominated my life for the last 10 years that it took me a minute to consider, and I was surprised at my response. I told him that I never expected to live in a country whose government officially embraced torture.

So I am a bit disgusted when I see cracks like this one out of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "I think he [President Obama] has made a practice of trying to apologize for America.… I personally am proud of America." I'm proud of my country, too, but I could be prouder if Rumsfeld and his colleagues in the Bush administration hadn't, during their post-9/11 panic, endorsed torture, either as a matter of policy (in the intelligence community) or through neglect (in the military, where in 2003-05, soldiers lacking guidance from people like Rumsfeld sometimes assumed the enemy in Iraq should be treated as terrorists without rights).

Torture and other abuse of people under American control was more than a crime; it was a strategic blunder: You can't win a war by undermining your own values, the things your country stands for. (Nor should you start wars on false premises, btw.) If that were not enough, the inept conduct of the war overseen by Rumsfeld in Iraq for three years until he was defenestrated late in 2006 almost certainly helped inflame the insurgency and so resulted in the deaths of American soldiers. Maybe he could apologize for some of that?

Mackubin Owens's new book, US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11, landed in my mailbox recently. I haven't had a chance to read it yet because I am deep into Vietnam War research and have about another 30 books to go before disappearing into the archives again later this month. But the Owens volume looks terrific. (Mac, by the way, is a Silver Star recipient who led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam and now leads classes at the Naval War College.) Anyone interested in this subject is going to have to get a copy.

In February 1968, a U.S. soldier was court-martialed simply for holding down a Vietnamese man while two Vietnamese soldiers waterboarded him, according to Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam. (329)

I mention this because both George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney now have publicly admitted they were approving of waterboarding, a form of torture that once was a crime in the eyes of the U.S. government -- and still is under international laws.

The Washington Post reports that in his new memoir, My Pointy Head, President Bush's response to a request to waterboard 9/11 big nut Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, "Damn right." (Meanwhile, Cheney stated earlier this year that, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding.")

The Post quotes Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: "Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting."

That said, it will be interesting to watch whether either of these guys, or their campaign-contributor ambassadors, ever travel in Europe. I suspect that one day we could see a lower-ranking type detained for questioning upon de-planing in EU territory.

I wasn't surprised that former Joint Chiefs Chairman Shelton was angry at the Bush administration. I was surprised to see him flatly charge that Bush administration officials lied. But I was even more surprised to see his conclusion that the Clinton administration ran more smoothly than Bush's, especially in handling the media. "You saw it from the very start, but it was really after 9/11 that you repeatedly saw that the left hand had no idea what the right one was doing." (460)

I was interested to see that Shelton came away with a real respect and even affection for Bill Clinton. This isn't surprising, perhaps -- after all, Clinton elevated him to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs. But remember that Clinton sometimes had a rocky relationship with the military. "From my standpoint, he was a brilliant individual with a keen understanding of the big picture, yet he could very quickly zero in and identify the weakest link in war plans. His focus was intense… I felt that as commander in chief, he would be hard to beat." (400)

That's basically the impression I took away from reading Without Hesitation, the memoirs of retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001. Boy is he steamed.

There are plenty of other people Shelton pings in the book, most notably John McCain. But the unquestionable No. 1 villain of the book is the former secretary of defense who, in Shelton's telling, elevated his old Princeton wrestling techniques into a management philosophy. "The McNamara-Rumsfeld model," as Shelton calls it, was "based on deception, deceit, working political agendas, and trying to get the Joint Chiefs to support an action that might not be the right thing to do for the country but would work well for the President from a political standpoint." (401) (As an experiment, I'm including page numbers -- should I continue doing this in future book discussions?) He adds, "It was the worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service." (413)

After his first meeting with Rumsfeld, Shelton recalls thinking, "We're going to need some heavy-duty cleaning supplies if all we're going to do is waste time having pissing contests like this." (407) When Rumsfeld was proven wrong in a meeting, Shelton says, he wouldn't admit it, but rather would press on and do "his best to stay afloat amid the bullshit he was shoveling out." (413)

At one point, Rumsfeld utterly rejected a plan for how to deal with Iraqi attacks on U.S. warplanes in the old "no-fly zones." Shelton liked the plan how it was, so when ordered to revamp it, he let it sit on his desk for a couple of weeks, and then sent it back to the defense secretary with a new label on it: "Rumsfeld Auto-Response Matrix." "He loved every word of it," Shelton reports with unconcealed contempt. (424)

This book is different from other senior generals' memoirs I've read, such as those by Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Tommy R. Franks. Hugh Shelton's telling stories and naming names. The first half of the book is a rather dull account of his earlier career, but that changes in his relation of his last year as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in 2001.

Overall, Shelton comes off like a good soldier and a decent and honorable man, but inexperienced in the ways of Washington, and so a bit of a babe in the woods when it comes to politics. I blame this situation on civilian officials, Democratic and Republican alike, who were so scared of the political clout that Colin Powell accumulated that they have picked a series of political non-starters as chairmen: Shalikashvili (his pop fought for the Nazis), Shelton (naïve about Washington), Myers and Pace (the two most pliable senior officers of recent memory). Admiral Mullen is proving to be an exception -- he stands up for himself, yet isn't trying to move into the political realm. I am not sure President Obama and his aides appreciate this.

Yeah, he did such a heckuva job on Iraq that now he is advising us on nuclear weapons policy. This would be like putting Brownie in charge of the Gulf of Mexico oil cleanup.

An Army officer mentioned to me recently that the thing that bothered him most about Feith on Iraq was not the policy but rather that Feith only came out to Iraq once or twice. I hadn't heard that before. 

One reader, old Obie Stephen Saideman, commented that I shouldn't just leave General Myers's view, expressed at a conference at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, hanging out there without offering my own thoughts. I thought about that, and I agree.

This is what I would say:

Calling Rumsfeld a former wrestler who liked to take an adversarial stance is indeed an alibi. Wrestlers face each other in a ring with a referee, on a fairly equal basis. Rumsfeld did not. Rather, I think he tended to bully people. It is one thing to chew out a subordinate who has to take it, but in my experience, Rumsfeld was very uncomfortable when dealing with people who didn't have to suffer him in silence. For example, with reporters who challenged him (like me), instead of happily going along for the ride, he tended to become snappish and sarcastic. Likewise, he seemed to squirm sometimes in congressional testimony, where he was the one who generally had to grin and bear it.

So yes, I should have thrown the bullshit flag, especially on Admiral Giambastiani, who was glib when he should have been serious.

Jane Mayer deserves some sort of special prize for all her writings -- a book and articles -- on the U.S. government's shameful and counterproductive use since 9/11 of torture in interrogations. I mention this because of her terrific review in the new issue of the New Yorker of a book by Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, who makes all sorts of wild claims about how well torture worked in protecting the country.

Here's a taste of the masterful job Mayer does of exposing the Thiessen book:

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is "completely and utterly wrong," according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch in 2006. "The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.," Clarke said, adding that Thiessen's "version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006." Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London's public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, "used exactly the same materials."

Nothing beats an on-the record response from those involved. The line I am getting from Theissen's defenders is that, Well, he criticized her, too, in his book. Let's see: One person is a reporter who worked alongside me the Wall Street Journal. The other was a flack for Jesse Helms and Rumsfeld. Who am I more likely to trust? It puzzles me that my old newspaper, The Washington Post, would hire Theissen to write for its op-ed page. How many former Bush speechwriters does one newspaper need?