Donald Rumsfeld, the United States Secretary of Defence Secretary, told President George W Bush in February about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. From the limited detail Rumsfeld recalled of that meeting, it can be deduced that Bush gave no orders, insisted on no responsibility and did not ask to see the already commissioned Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention them.
For decades, Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great white shark of the bureaucratic seas: sleek, fast-moving and voracious. As counsellor to Richard Nixon during the impeachment crisis his deputy was the young Dick Cheney and together they helped to right the ship of state under Gerald Ford.
Here they were given a misleading gloss as moderates; competence at handling power was confused with pragmatism. Cheney became the most hardline of congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that he was always more conservative than they imagined.
One lesson they seem to have learned from the Nixon debacle is ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy.
Under Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs of government, drawing staff from the neo-conservative cabal and infusing their rightwing temperaments with ideological imperatives. The unvarnished will to power took on a veneer of ideas and idealism. Iraq was not a case of vengeance or power, but the cause of democracy and human rights.
The fate of the neo-conservative project depends on Rumsfeld’s job. If he goes, so will his deputy, the neo-conservative Robespierre, Paul Wolfowitz, and the cadres behind the disinformation that neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate public opinion before the war.
In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld explained that the government’s request to the press not to report Abu Ghraib ”is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news.”
Six soldiers from a West Virginia unit who treated Abu Ghraib as a playpen for pornographic torture have been designated as scapegoats. Will the show trials of these working-class antiheroes put an end to inquiries about the chain of command?
In an extraordinary editorial, the Army Times, which has not previously ventured into such controversy, declared that ”the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons … This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountabilty here is essential — even if that means relieving leaders from duty in a time of war.”
William Odom, a retired general and former member of the National Security Council who is now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank, reflects a wide swathe of opinion in the upper ranks of the military.
”It was never in our interest to go into Iraq,” he said. It is a ”diversion” from the war on terrorism; the rationale for the Iraq war (finding weapons of mass destruction) is ”phoney”; the US army is overstretched and being driven ”into the ground”; and the prospect of building a democracy is ”zero”.
In Iraqi politics, he says, ”legitimacy is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. We can’t afford to fail, that’s mindless. The issue is how we stop failing more.”
One high-level military strategist told me that Rumsfeld is ”detested”, and that ”if there’s a sentiment in the army it is: Support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld”.
In 1992, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defence University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for ”The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012”.
His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that drew the military into a coup disastrous for democracy.
The military, of course, is bound to uphold the Constitution. But Dunlap wrote: ”The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It’s too late for me to do any more. But it’s not for you.”
Today the essay is circulating among top US military strategists. — Â