THE FACE OF WAR

RUMSFELD IS GETTING a makeover.  Why his image is getting the remake is hard to say right now. Is his face taking some cosmetics for when he gets laid out in the political coffin?  Or is he being made fresh to gain new fans?  The WaPo Magazine details The Other Donald’s majesty and misgivings in a pre-war memo.

"It would have been probably October of '02, and the war was March, I think," of the following year, Rumsfeld explains. "I sat down, and I said, 'What are all the things that one has to anticipate could be a problem?' And circulated it and read it to the president -- sent it to the president. Gave it to the people in the department, and they planned against those things. And all of the likely and unlikely things that one could imagine are listed there. It was just on the off-chance we'd end up having a conflict. We didn't know at that stage."

THE OFF-CHANCE we’d end up having a conflict?  Some will forget how troops were surrounding Iraq even then, some will forget all the Downing memos.  Some won’t care because they see the world better with Saddam gone.  Still you have to ask some questions:

But then you wonder: Why did Rumsfeld write that memo, at that moment, and why is he flagging it now? . . . One of "Rumsfeld's Rules," the booklet of maxims and tenets he has coined and updated through his lifetime in management, notes that "it is easier to get into something than to get out of it." The time to stop an idea is before it gets moving.

SO RUMSFELD IS ON THE WAY out or he is getting ready to write a book?  Is he trying to stop more criticism in its tracks before it comes closer?  Or maybe rock star Rumstud just misses the attention he got at the start of the war.  With all the talk of torture and of quagmire, less attention better suits him.

LESS IS MORE is the Rumsfeld story. Less is more is behind his strategy of armed forces transformation.  Rumsfeld forever the college wrestler diets down to his weight limit and grapples the world to the mat.  Lean is mean, but perhaps he has leaned on less is more too long.

The crux of the complaint against the secretary is this: Whenever Rumsfeld has faced a choice between doing more in Iraq or doing less, he has done less. When, during the pre-invasion planning, the State Department sent a team of Iraq experts to the Pentagon to help prepare a major reconstruction effort for the aftermath, Rumsfeld turned some of them away. As a result, "there was simply no plan, other than humanitarian assistance and a few other things like protection of oil and so forth, with regard to postwar Iraq. There was no plan," retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell, explained in a recent speech.

HOW DID WE GET here and where are we going?  Few may now remember Rumsfeld talking about drawing down troops, the euphemism for pulling them out.  Few may remember Rumsfeld’s relatively dark assessments in contrast to Cheney’s and the cabalistas. Is it because Rumsfeld is tired of the fight or are there new battles yet to be fought and the world yet to be transformed?

Many pro-war insiders believed that Rumsfeld was the origin of Novak's startling declaration that "inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is a strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying, Ready or not, here we go." Bush quickly shot down the trial balloon, but Novak stood fast, pointedly boasting in a follow-up piece that Rumsfeld had not repudiated the original column.

RUMSFELD REMAINS standing.  Some will recall his odd quotes when stress positions and standing were topics of torture and abuse in the news, how Rumsfeld said he worked at his standing desk for eight to ten hours.  Rumsfeld, the image of Rumsfeld remains, standing tall and studlike, even when others are unwatching.  What he stands for some will always question.

"The ramparts of Washington are littered with the bleached bones of people who said Donald Rumsfeld was not going to survive," DiRita says happily. Rumsfeld's serenity comes from a distinctive blend of freshness and age. DiRita describes his boss as thirsty for new knowledge and also supremely confident in himself, able to make tough decisions without fretting or second-guessing.

WASHINGTON IS THE GRAVEYARD of ambition, where dreams are transformed, some lost, and nightmares walk, where loyalty walks away.  Rumsfeld stands alone, a sphynx occasionally offering odd aphorisms.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING
[Rumsfeld Bio] [Transformation] [Strategic Communication pdf] [Nat Hentoff: Defendant Donald Rumsfeld]

SOME QUESTIONS Will anyone like the answers?
AFTERCARE? [Belgravia Dispatch] I recently asked a very high level former national security player who, given that Bush has seemingly deputized the entire prosecution of the Iraq war to Rumsfeld, could be brought in in his place (just if, by some miracle, Bush was finally able to wean himself from his sad dependency on Rumsfeld). He said that was an excellent question, paused for a good while, and appeared to draw blanks at first.

THE HERETIK ALSO CONSIDERS what to do with Rumsfeld?  What to do with his war?

A DEFENSE OF RUMSFELD [Nitpicker] OK, not defense, but, if Rumsfeld has been wrong, as William Kristol and other neocons contend in this WaPo article, one has to question if he can even come close to the vast, embarrassing wrongness of Kristol and his compatriots?
Am I the only one that remembers their victory dances when they thought the mission had been so easily accomplished?

THE HERETIK RECALLS it will be a rose petal cakewalk . . . we will be greeted as liberators . . .  oy.