And so ends the long, hard slog that was the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon. Surely unwilling to submit to the endless nightmare posed by two years' worth of Senate and House inquiries into his tenure as defense secretary, Rumsfeld did what he -- and President Bush -- promised he wouldn't, and abandoned his post. Immediately, the cheers rang out. Bush, echoing the departing secretary, talked about "fresh eyes" for the war in Iraq. Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi intoned, "I think it will give a fresh start to finding a solution to Iraq rather than staying the course." Her colleagues, possible Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, architect of the Dems' Senate rout, agreed.
But by far, the biggest plaudits for Rumsfeld's ouster have come from the war's most stalwart defenders. Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and FOX commentator, has been calling for Rumsfeld's head since before 9/11. Kristol has sniped at Rumsfeld for his "arrogant buck-passing"; for having "only grudgingly and belatedly been willing to adjust even a little bit to realities on the ground" in Iraq; for "breezily dodg[ing] responsibility and so glibly pass[ing] the buck" – and that was just in one short Washington Post op-ed from two years ago. Similarly, once upon a time, Joe Lieberman, the reelected Senator from Thermopylae, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq." But even a hawk as bloodthirsty as Lieberman now agrees that Rumsfeld's time is due. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, a more chastened hawk, blogged today that Rumsfeld had become "increasingly deranged" and cheered his departure as "great news."
Rumsfeld's departure is, indeed, great news. Notwithstanding the claims of no-nothings like Michael Novak that Rummy was "the best Defense Secretary the U.S. has ever had," Rumsfeld was incontrovertibly, and by a wide margin, the worst. No defense secretary in history ever consciously sought to antagonize the Army on matters great, small, and otherwise. No defense secretary in history devoted more resources to refuting editorials about his mismanagement than looking into what might have caused those criticisms to arise. And no defense secretary in history has ever managed to preside over two deteriorating wars, let alone simultaneously.
But there's an additional upside to the end of the Rumsfeld era: no more will Iraq hawks be able to wash away their sins in the blood of the defense secretary. It's no accident, after all, that Rumsfeld has been the hawk's favorite whipping boy. It's part and parcel of what my colleagues Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld called "the incompetence dodge" -- a none-too-subtle way of shifting the blame for a disastrous war away from the failed ideas that made it possible and onto the lesser beings in charge of implementing a stillborn strategy. Now, to mangle a line from Bob Dylan, in the post-Rumsfeld phase of the Iraq war even the president of the United States will have to stand naked. And so will the war's defenders.
Bizarrely, it's my former overlord Marty Peretz of The New Republic who most incisively summed up Rumsfeld: "He was certainly the fall-guy for the Iraq war." That is to say, if Rumsfeld never existed, it would have been necessary for hawks to invent him. Even prior to the war, the need for scapegoats for a prospective disaster was in full force. Conservative hawks preemptively pointed fingers at the nefarious elements within the CIA, the State Department, and the uniformed military, all of whom stood accused of appeasement, short-sightedness, insufficient hard-headedness, and even a lack of patriotism. For liberal hawks, Bush was simply a man too deeply flawed to grasp the historical task they had agreed upon: Paul Berman preferred to confer the title "leader of the free world" on Tony Blair, a more erudite figure. The New Republic even ran a cover in February 2003 featuring the images of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, asking, "WHICH OF THESE MEN IS BETRAYING IRAQI DEMOCRACY?"
A better question, of course, concerns why the Washington aviary of hawks -- some sincere in their hopes for an ideational Iraqi democracy, others unconcerned -- believed that it was in America's power, let alone interest, to topple a contained dictator; introduce chaos into the heart of the Middle East; rearrange the sectarian balance of power in Iraq; occupy a frontline Arab state for an indefinite amount of time; and usher in not merely a "democracy" but what Bush called in his press conference today an "ally in the war on terrorism."
While the Iraq war has become a disaster, the obvious failures in its implementation -- the inability to deliver basic services like electricity and gas, to say nothing of security or political progress -- have overshadowed the more basic failure in its strategy. The ten or so crises daily that Iraq generates have largely allowed hawks to avoid confronting unpleasant truths, such as the degree to which the war plays into Osama bin Laden's conscious, broader strategy of drawing the United States into counterproductive overreactions.
Now that their favorite whipping boy is gone, perhaps Kristol, Sullivan, Lieberman, and the rest -- and the organs that give voice to their views -- will take the opportunity to reexamine what it is about their worldviews that led us to the Iraq quagmire. A question they might want to ask themselves is whether their ideology ensures that we can't capture, kill or deter and dissuade more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us. Say what you will about Rumsfeld -- and, really, there's an awful lot to say about him -- but that was his question.
Spencer Ackerman is a Prospect senior correspondent.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to The American Prospect here.
Support independent media with a tax-deductible donation here.
