Days before the election George W Bush told journalists that there was no way Donald Rumsfeld would leave his job during the president’s administration. But, as Rumsfeld famously once observed, ”Stuff happens”.
What happened was a sudden shift in the terms of trade in American politics; Rumsfeld became too heavy a liability for a president struggling to salvage a legacy. Even while insisting Rumsfeld was doing a ”fantastic job”, Bush said he had been thinking of replacing him before Tuesday’s Democrat victory.
That may well be true. Concern about the conduct of the Iraq war and a lack of faith in Rumsfeld were two of the few issues uniting Democrats and Republicans in a polarised political scene. A string of Republican candidates made Rumsfeld’s dismissal part of their platforms, and it was the first demand from the lips of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. On the election eve, the Army Times and other military newspapers published an editorial demanding ”Rumsfeld must go”.
The defence secretary is paying not just the price for a war that is going badly; he alarmed his former supporters in Congress and in the administration by his apparent conviction that it was on the right course.
To many, it came across as complacency, just like his attitude to the wave of looting that struck Baghdad in the wake of the 2003 invasion. He referred to this as the ”untidiness” of liberation and made the famous remark, ”Stuff happens”, that has become a byword for callousness.
His relationship with the generals in the Pentagon began badly when he took office, and went downhill. He had been defence secretary before, during the Ford administration.
When he returned to the Pentagon the former college wrestler was ready for a fight. He wanted ”military transformation” to create a lighter, more agile army, one more integrated with the other armed forces. The army was not happy.
Military transformation was officially put on hold on September 11 2001. Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when the hijacked plane hit. He ran out and helped supervise the attempt to rescue survivors, refusing to heed the appeals of his staff to take cover.
However, the principles behind military transformation were on his mind as he oversaw the US’s subsequent campaign. In Afghanistan the lightweight, special forces-led approach worked — at least to begin with. When it came to Iraq, he wanted to do the same, pushing his generals to reduce the number of troops they estimated as necessary to invade. It seemed to work; until April 2003 and the fall of Baghdad. Then the strategy fell apart. There were not enough troops to control the looting, and then there were not enough to control the insurgency. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2003 looked as if it would cost him his job, and he later revealed he had twice offered to resign. But Bush refused his offer.
Bush is known to value loyalty, and Rumsfeld was perfectly loyal. Political observers have also suggested that allowing Rumsfeld to leave would have implied an admission of failure in Iraq, and the president — until Wednesday — had been unwilling to make that admission.
”I’m not sure if this is the president’s sop to the critics, or Rumsfeld’s attempt to get out of town one step ahead of a subpoena,” said Daniel Goure, a Pentagon adviser at Washington’s Lexington Institute. — Â