[Here are Parts I, II, III, and IV.] 

Ricks: Rajiv, you have been unnaturally patient. [Gestures dramatically with open right hand] This is a man who, in Baghdad, was famous for shouting at people, "Right now, right now, right now!" He was a great bureau chief.

Chandrasekaran: I'm just taking all this in. It's fascinating. I find myself agreeing with an awful lot of what's being said around the table.

Just sort of building on a lot of this, I feel like the military does a great job of looking at troop-to-task calculations. We don't we do that on the diplomatic side of things? There was this assumption building on, all right, September 12: Was the Taliban really our enemy? We then -- fast-forward a couple months -- think that we can have a reasonably strong central government, civilian government, in a country with zero institutions, with no human capacity. There just, from the very beginning, weren't the necessary questions asked about what this would take, not from a military point of view, but from a whole-of-government point of view.

All these assumptions get baked in that wind up being completely contradictory and counterproductive to any efforts to build a stable government, and at no point do we step up and say, "Wait. This doesn't make sense." Part of it's a bandwidth issue. Part of it is, I think, civilian sides of our government aren't doing the necessary sorts of calculations about: Is this in our best interests? Is this doable? What would it take to do it? And then, even further, getting right back to the beginning, the question of space; one associated issue with this -- and I don't mean to blame the victim here -- we don't do a good enough job of saying no to the partners we're trying to help. Not just internationally, but the Afghans themselves. You know, when the Afghans say, "We want to centralize power in Kabul because, you know, Ashraf Ghani says it's going to help fight corruption," we don't push back meaningfully and say, "Yes, but it's completely unrealistic given the capacity of your government." When [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai says, "We want you ISAF forces to go push into these districts because we've got bad guys there," we don't do a good enough job of saying, "Wait a second; it doesn't make sense to do that."

Ricks: General Jabouri, listening to this, as someone who has dealt with the Americans, what do you think of Rajiv's analysis? Are the Americans able to say no? Do they make intelligent decisions, from your perspective as an Iraqi general and a mayor of a city?

Jabouri: I think the Americans, in the beginning, always take the ally from who said, "OK, do everything they want." And they're strong. Like Chalabi, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, someone, they always say to them, "OK, I'm from this hand to this hand [extends hands, palms up]." But after that discover they chose the wrong man. The ally is not the man who says it is always OK to do things.

Ricks: So again, a lack of sufficient thought, of understanding, going into the situation.

Jabouri: I think also they depended totally on the people outside Iraq, not from inside Iraq. The do not make a balance between that, but now we see the result in Iraq, with what happened.

Ricks: Ms. Flournoy?

Flournoy: I think this point about really being thoughtful about your political objectives and what's the goals and the strategy to achieve them and not being all things to all people is really important. And I think it is something that we really struggle with. When you ask why, I do think it does also speak to the imbalance in our own investment as a government. I mean, we have this tremendously -- well, at least historically -- well-resourced military, well trained, well cultivated. Obviously when you put thousands of Americans in harm's way, a lot of attention is going to rightfully be focused in that direction to make sure we know what we're doing and are managing that well.

But again, if you think what drives the success or failure of these operations, it is your political objectives and your political strategy and how well you frame those question. I would argue we don't grow on the civilian side grand strategists, we don't grow political strategists. You occasionally find them, and I can list a few I admire and respect. But I remember one of the most difficult moments of the Iraqi government formation, sitting in the embassy in Baghdad saying, "Well, what're we going to do? What's our strategy to help them cohere?" Not that the U.S. was going to dictate the outcome, but how are we going to help get over this hump and move forward? Having the senior political officer at the time tell me, "Well, that's not my job. My job, as the political officer, is to observe and report." And I said, "I'm sorry. We invaded a country. We are occupying this country. Your job is thinking about the political strategy that's going to help put it back together again on sustainable terms." But that's not what we train people to do; it's not what we resource them to do. And I do think it's connected to this fundamental imbalance of resources and that we didn't put enough time, attention, thought, focus, resources into the whole civilian side of what we were doing.

Dubik: In conflicts that are essentially not winnable, militarily. The military operations are necessary, but they're not sufficient. They're not even decisive.

Ricks: Emile Simpson makes this very good point in his new book, War From the Ground Up, as a young British officer who fought in Afghanistan that you've got to turn Clausewitz on his head and look as this as violent politics, not as warfare that leads to a political outcome. A lot of it is political operations coming out of the barrel of a gun.

By Lt. Cdr. David Forman, US Navy

Best Defense guest correspondent

Before President Obama's national security team started their analysis in 2009 that eventually led to the current rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, then-Senator Jim Webb experienced a peculiar event. It was so peculiar that it now helps shape his argument that we need another type of rebalance: one that returns the legislative and executive branches to actual co-equal partners in government.

In December of 2008, Sen. Webb entered a soundproof room to review the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) that would shape our long-term relations with Iraq. Though not actually classified, the White House controlled the document as though it was. According to the logbook he signed to enter the room, Sen. Webb was the first member of the legislative branch to review it. The irony of "secretly" reviewing a document that should have been written or thoroughly debated by Congress was not lost on such an experienced public servant.

In his recent article, "Congressional Abdication," in The National Interest, Webb draws attention to three main events he believes indicate Congress is not fulfilling the full range of its responsibilities, including Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution as it pertains to use of the military. First, as mentioned above, the Congress did not play any meaningful role in the development of the SFA agreement with Iraq. Though not an official treaty, the agreement was a unique display of exclusive executive-branch negotiations. Second, and most alarming to Webb, is that the Congress played no part in debating or approving combat operations in Libya in March 2011, a previously unprecedented type of military intervention. And last, the Congress was kept in the dark until the president was ready to sign the strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan in May 2012.

To be clear, Webb's remarks at a recent session at the officers of The National Interest began with, "I'm not on a crusade." He is not trying to throw stones in the Congressional arena now that he is on the sidelines. Webb's goal is to provide an honest and insightful assessment of the current imbalance between the two branches.

After the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in 2001, the president was understandably afforded great leeway to act. No elected official wanted to be seen as unpatriotic in the aftermath of such a penetrating and deadly assault on American territory. However, the complexity and diversity of pursuant foreign policy issues combined with the perpetual need to fundraise has prevented Congress from digging deep into foreign policy issues and recovering the ground it patriotically sacrificed in 2001.

The path to rebalancing is not easy or entirely clear, but recognition by the president and the Congress, the media, and the American people is a necessary first step. Congressional approval may seem like a nuisance in the pace of today's political developments, but it is also vitally important. Not only does this process adhere to our laws, it also shows the resolve of the American government and the nation it represents.

Though the eventual solution will take time, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a natural focal point to help restore legislative balance to executive branch involvement in foreign policy. The framework for Congressional involvement and genuine oversight still exists, but its members must duly exercise this capability. With American involvement in Afghanistan winding down, issues with North Korea and Iran are most likely front-runners of opportunity for the Congress to reassert its constitutional authorities and work as a co-equal partner to steer our nation through a myriad of upcoming foreign-policy decisions.

LCDR David Forman, USN, is a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The views presented here are his own and do not represent those of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

Ricks: What I hear from around this table is a remarkable, surprising consensus to me. I'm not hearing any tactical problems, any issues about training, about the quality of our forces.

Instead, again and again what I'm hearing is problems at the strategic level, especially problems of the strategic process. To sum up the questions, they are asking: Do our military and civilian leaders know what they are doing? And that goes to the process issues and to general strategic thinking. That's one bundle of questions. The second emphasis I'm hearing, and this also kind of surprised me, is, should we have, from the get-go, focused on indigenous forces rather than injecting large conventional forces? That is, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have we tried to do El Salvador, but wound up instead doing Vietnam in both, to a degree?

Mudd: Just one quick comment on that as a non-military person: It seems to me there's an interesting contrast here between target and space. That is: Do we hold space and do we help other people help us hold space, or do we simply focus on a target that's not very space-specific? And I think at some point fairly early on we transitioned there [from target to space], which is why I asked my initial question. A lot of the comments I hear are about the problem of holding space, and should we have had someone else do it for us? And I wonder why we ever got into that game.

Ricks: Into which game?

Mudd: Into the game of holding space as opposed to eliminating a target that doesn't really itself hold space.

Alford: It's our natural tendency as an army to do that. To answer another question, it's also our natural tendency as an army to build an army that looks like us, which is the exact opposite of what we should do. They're not used to our culture. One quick example, if I could: the Afghan border police. The border police, we tried to turn them into, essentially, like our border police and customs agents. Right across the border, the Pakistani Army uses frontier guardsmen. Why do they do that? They use their culture -- a man with a gun that fights in the mountains is a warrior. He's respected by his people. He's manly. All those things matter, and it draws men to that organization. We always talk about how our borders on [the Afghan] side are so porous; it's because we don't have a manly force that wants to go up into the mountains and kill bad guys, because we didn't use their culture.

Ricks: So we're already breaking new ground here. We're holding up the Pakistanis as a model!

Alford: On that piece. It's a cultural thing.

Dubik: I agree with the second comment. On the first point, in terms of why we held space, I think it's how we defined the problem. We defined the problem not as al Qaeda -- it was "al Qaeda and those who give them sanctuary." And so we couldn't conceive of a way to get at al Qaeda without taking the Taliban down, and because of the problem definition, we inherited a country.

Ricks: So what you're saying is actually that these two problems I laid out come together in the initial strategic decision framing of the problem.

Fastabend: I don't think there was such framing.

Ricks: The initial lack of framing...

Fastabend: Getting back to Ms. Cash, we didn't really decide what the questions were. We thought we knew the question. You know, we thought we had in each case [of Afghanistan and Iraq] governments to support that would hold space, and that was a secondary thing that came on us when we got there: that actually the sovereign government wasn't so sovereign.

Ricks: I just want to throw in the question that [British] Lt. Gen. Sir Graeme Lamb sent. He couldn't be here today. General Lamb said, "My question is, given the direction I had -‘remove the Taliban, mortally wound al Qaeda, and bring its leadership to account' -- who came up with the neat idea of rebuilding Afghanistan?"

Mudd: It's interesting. If you define threat as capability and intent to strike us, then I think there's confusion early on with the Taliban, because I would say they had neither the capability nor intent to strike us, but they provide safe haven. If you look at areas where we have entities that have those twin capabilities or those twin strengths -- Yemen and Somalia come to mind, maybe northern Mali -- we're able to eliminate threat without dealing with geography. So there are examples where you can say, "Well, we faced a fundamental -- I mean, not as big a problem as Afghanistan." But you look at how threat has changed in just the past two years, and I don't think anyone would say that the threat, in terms of capability and intent, of Shabab or al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is anywhere near where it was a few years ago. That's because we focused on target, not geography.

Glasser: Just to go back to this question, was the original sin, if you will, focusing on U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan, versus working from the beginning to create or shore up local forces? I want to probe into that a little bit. How much did people at the time understand that as a challenge? I remember being in Kabul for the graduation of the first U.S.-trained contingent of Afghan army forces, and they were Afghan army forces. These guys worked for warlords that had come together, Northern Alliance warlords who made up the fabric of the Defense Ministry. They had nothing to do with an Afghan force, and that's why we're still training them now.

Ricks: But Colonel Alford's point is that, those are the guys you want to work with, though. But don't work with them on your terms; work with them on their terms.

Glasser: But that's what we did. That's what we do. We worked with the warlords in Afghanistan. That's who our partners were in toppling the Taliban.

Alford: But we never turned it over to them, though. In '04, I was [in Afghanistan] as a battalion commander. We never would let them fight unless we always led the way. It's part of our culture, too, as soldiers and Marines. You send an infantry battalion into a fight, they're going to fight. It takes a lot to step back and let the Afghans do it, and do it their way. Provide them the medevacs and fire support -- that's the advisory role for those missions we're going to switch to this spring, and I'm all for it. We should have done this four years ago, but now we also need to see if this is going to work over the next almost two years. We need to be ruthless with young lieutenant colonels and colonels who want to get out there and fight, or generals who do, to support the Afghans and then see how they do against the Taliban. I'll tell you how they're gonna do: They're gonna whoop 'em. The Taliban does not have the capability to beat the Afghan army if we get out of their way.

(more)

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on March 1, 2011.

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)

According to my reporting, Cheney went further in that meeting, telling the Saudi ambassador, "Saddam is toast." In addition, General Myers outlined the battle plan from a Top Secret map.

When I interviewed Rumsfeld on Oct. 23, 2003, less than a year after that meeting, he said he "looked him [Bandar] in the eye and said, you can count on this. In other words at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

All other evidence shows that at least by Jan. 2003, Bush had decided on war. Earlier that month he told Rice, "Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war." That month he also told Karl Rove, his top political adviser, who was planning for the re-election campaign the next year, "We got a war coming."

As numerous accounts have documented, the post-war planning and organization was close to a disaster. Rumsfeld blames the lack of "effective interagency coordination" and "the way the United States government is organized." (p. 487)

As secretary of defense he was responsible. Under our system, he was next in the chain of command after the president, effectively making him the deputy president for war. But he sidestepped his responsibility time and time again.

Some six weeks after the invasion Rumsfeld visited Iraq and was leaving on his plane. He had been notified by General Tommy R. Franks, who was retiring as combatant commander for the region, that Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan "would be the senior commander in Iraq for 90 days." (p. 497) He then recounts this scene, which would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic:

On my flight heading back to Kuwait City I was startled to see McKiernan onboard the C-130 aircraft. I asked him where he was going.

"To my headquarters back in Kuwait," he said.

"Well, aren't you in charge of what's going on in Iraq?" I asked.

McKiernan told me he went in and out of Iraq once, sometimes twice a week to check on things. It struck me that in the crucial weeks following the fall of Saddam, McKiernan did not seem to think of himself as the command in charge of the ground operations ... McKiernan seemed to have removed himself from the critical daily responsibilities in the country.

Rumsfeld makes no effort to explain how he, the well-known control freak, would allow such drift and ambiguity about who was in charge. 

By June 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the junior three-star in the Army was made commander in Iraq (p. 500-01). "I do not recall being made aware of the Army's decision to move General Sanchez into the top position," Rumsfeld writes. The Army's? It was an abdication of his own, clear responsibility.

Though Rumsfeld occasionally praises Bush, a careful reading shows that he clearly feels that Bush did not lead enough. "NSC meetings with the president did not always end with clear conclusions and instructions," he wrote on page 319, seemingly directing his fire at Rice. "The core problems the NSC faced resulted from the effort to paper over differences of views."(p. 329). But then he takes aim right at Bush, "I thought it unlikely that Rice was managing the NSC as she did without Bush's awareness and agreement."

And so the book marches to the end. Chapter 49, the seven pages covering his firing by Bush as the secretary of defense, is called "Farewells." He launders the whole episode. Because he was willing to resign, he makes it sounds almost voluntary when Cheney calls to tell him that Bush wants "to make a change." When he meets with Bush (p. 707) to submit his resignation letter, Rumsfeld writes with classic condescension, "I tried to make the situation easier for him." It was almost, he subtly and deceptively suggests, as if Bush didn't want to do it. He writes that Bush told him, "This is hard for me. You are a pro. You're a hell of a lot better than others in this town."

Rumsfeld is indeed a pro -- at ducking and weaving and dodging responsibility, a reflection of much of what is worst in Washington.

Near the end of the Oct. 23, 2003 interview -- page 39 of my transcript -- this interchange took place, illustrating the worst and the best of him:

Rumsfeld: "And you lie, you told people I stuck a finger in your chest. I never stuck a finger in your chest."

Woodward: "Yes, sir, yes, yes."

Rumsfeld: "I never touched your chest."

Woodward: "I swear you did."

Rumsfeld: "Did I?"

Woodward: "Yeah, you did."

Rumsfeld: "Physically?"

Woodward: "You did, physically, it wasn't hostile you were illustrating a point."

Rumsfeld: "Good."

Woodward: "I explained that. I thought you scored a very good point."

Rumsfeld: (laughter)

Woodward: "Which was about surprise and off balance."

Rumsfeld: "Oh yes, I did. I remember that you're right ...Yeah, right, you are right ...I said you got to get a little off balance -- I've done that. He's right, I'm wrong."

He had moved from calling me a liar to acknowledging that my memory was correct and his wrong. He probably should have been more tentative at both the front end and the back end, but there it was, Rumsfeld in full.

On July 7 and 8, 2006, I conducted nearly three hours of interviews with Rumsfeld. Near the end, I heard the final denial.  I quoted Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who had said, "Any military commander who is honest with you will say he's made mistakes that have cost lives."

"Is that correct?" I asked.

"I don't know. I suppose that a military commander --"

"Which you are," I interrupted.

"No, I'm not," Rumsfeld said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"No, no well ..."

"Yes, yes," I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the chain of command. "It's commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander."

He said, "I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case."

I quoted this interchange in my third Bush book, State of Denial, and then wrote: "Indirection? Two or three steps removed?" This was truly inexplicable. It was as if he could not see himself and realize that he was avoiding his duty. When all the records are available, the other memoirs written and the history complete, this failure to accept responsibility will likely be his legacy.

Torture fan Marc Thiessen continues his war on American values in a response to Jane Mayer's recent takedown of him in the New Yorker.

His exhibit A: Hey, the former director of the CIA agrees with me! A lot of his other stuff is similar evidence of a "dog bites man" nature. 

He concludes that Mayer has made a career of spinning the torture narrative. Actually, Marc, she had a career long before that. She just happened to be appalled by you and your panicky pals and rightly focused on the damage you all have done to the country. I believe that more has been done than is publicly known.

I really do believe in civility and tolerance. But people who undermine our country, its values, and its standing in the world are close to the edge for me.

There's more here, but I feel like I have to go take a shower. (HT on this link to Mr. Andrew Sullivan)

One of the more interesting relationships in DC is the running battle between Donald Rumsfeld and his former aide and friend Ken "Cakewalk" Adelman. As I recall, it went public when Adelman, once a very loud Iraq hawk, began questioning the Bush team's conduct of the Iraq war around 2006. For example, he said of the Bush administration's national security officials that, "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

The feud recently surfaced again in the letters section of the Wall Street Journal. One letter this week began, " Ken Adelman's rebuttal (Letters, June 18) of Donald Rumsfeld's June 13 criticism of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea repeats two persistent myths about this deeply flawed and unnecessary treaty . . . . "

This may seem an obscure fight between figures of the past, but could be relevant if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would think it would be great to have Rumsfeld around as an elder statesman.

One thing the Army does not do so well is reward its people who do some of its toughest jobs -- investigating the lapses of the institution.

Yesterday I watched this interview General Taguba gave to West Point's oral history project. It has some interesting tidbits. When he tried to catch up with Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski to interview her for his investigation of detainee abuse and torture (that was his conclusion, he says) at Abu Ghraib, he said, "She was trying to leave the country." (I think the country in question was Kuwait.)

His overall conclusion was that Abu Ghraib "was a systemic failure of leadership at the tactical level," with major lapses committed by the staff of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. "You had a very ambigious chain of command . . . I said, 'Jeez, doesn't anyone ever follow doctrine around here?" (This had to do with who should be overseeing detainee operations -- intelligence, MPs, or operations.)

When he briefed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on the report in May 2004, he said, "he wasn't even remotely interested" in the findings of the report, and seemed to focus more on who had leaked it. He says he doesn't know for sure, but suspects that Douglas Feith, the under secretary of Defense for policy, suggested to the Army that Taguba be retired.

Taguba's bottom line: "The only institution that actually paid the price was the U.S. Army, and the rest of the military." The Bush administration officials who promulgated "a horrific set of policies" got off scot-free.

I think a presidential medal of freedom for Taguba, who did the hard right thing to do instead of the easy wrong thing to do, is the right thing to do. I also think it might balance the ones wrongly given to Tommy R. Franks and George Tenet.

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?