Scapegoating Rummy

David Frum suggests that conservatives must have a reckoning with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's record if they're to credibly make the case for their political future:

Conservatives should be focused instead on a very different question – an unpleasant one, but one absolutely essential to our indispensable, inevitable but still postponed reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration. The question is: Why did Iraq go so very badly wrong – and why, having gone wrong, did it take so ruinously wrong for the administration to shift to a more successful course? Conservatives rightly take pride and comfort in the achievements of the surge. But the surge does not banish all the antecedent questions about Iraq. The surge may have rescued the American position in Iraq from total disaster, but nobody would describe the present situation in Iraq as anything like satisfactory.

Indeed. But in such a reckoning, I'd argue that Rumsfeld is actually a bit player.

Let's rewind the tape and replay an alternate history of the run-up to the Iraq war. In our new reality, Rumsfeld bows to the wishes of General Shinsheki and 300,000 U.S. troops pour into Baghdad. Are they enough? Not if RAND's population security figures are correct - we'd still be about 200,000 short of the 500,000 we would need to adequately police Iraq.

A few years ago, I asked John Pike, the military analyst who runs Global Security.org, what would happen if the Bush administration had heeded RAND's advice. Here's what he told me: "If they had put 500,000 troops in Iraq in 2003, they would have all gone home with no replacements by early 2004, just before the insurgency really took off. The question is not how many to put in initially, but rather how many can be sustained. The current number is sustainable indefinitely. A larger number would have required a larger Army."

And Army we didn't have - and still don't. And what of the Army we did have when contemplating the invasion of Iraq? Did they know Iraq's culture? No. Did they speak Arabic? No. Were they Muslim? No. Were they skilled and trained at population security? No. Did they obviate the need for Paul Bremer to head the Coalition Provisional Authority? No. So the two major policy decisions that spur the insurgency - the demobilization of the Iraqi Army and de-Baathification - happen anyway.

The fundamental problem with the Iraq war was the decision to go to war with Iraq. It was a strategic failure. It was an ideological failure. A "reckoning" with Rumsfeld's bureaucratic domineering and obduracy is, at best, a sideshow.

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Photo Credit: DefenseLink.mil