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1327Il nous semble intéressant de revenir sur un article de Jason Vest (voir aussi notre récente “Notes de lecture”) qui donne un aperçu détaillé de la carrière de Donald Rumsfeld. L'importance que tient cet homme aujourd'hui dans la machinerie washingtonienne justifie ce rappel.
Cette étude date du début 2001, au moment de la nomination de Rumsfeld. Certains extraits, lecture faite à la lumière des événements actuels, montrent que L'analyse de Vest est particulièrement fondée. Nous en citons trois exemples :
• Sur l'importance et la personnalité des conseillers extérieurs sur la ligne suivie au Pentagone, avec les cas de Perle et de Gaffney.
« John Pike says defense watchers are keeping a close eye on whether the cabinet secretaries fill their senior staff positions with “the mad dogs and hard-line ideologues.” There's potential for more blasts from the past: Even if they don't return to government in official capacities, the likes of Gaffney and Perle will doubtless be called on as advisers or sounding boards, and they may enjoy greater access and influence than they have in years. »
• Cette remarque sur la “faiblesse” de Rumsfeld pourrait être prise pour un bon commentaire sur la situation actuelle en Afghanistan, sur la façon dont lui-même (Rumsfeld) a hésité, et hésite encore, quant à la politique à suivre, sur la façon aussi où des occasions ont été sacrifiées parce que Rumsfeld a refusé d'engager des forces suffisantes à terre (en quelque sorte, un effet par contradiction de sa faiblesse : Rumsfeld craindrait tant de se tromper sur les situations extérieures qu'il refuserait tout engagement sérieux).
« Rumsfeld — who had said from the beginning that he'd only do the Middle East gig for six months — resigned in May, with little to show for his efforts except an emboldened and resolute Assad. Though all of this happened 16 years ago, some observers hold that the episode highlights a Rumsfeld weakness, especially in today's world: an inability to appreciate the subtleties of situations where American power and force, however looming they might appear, won't work, or are likely to create more problems than they solve. In some respects, he may have learned his lesson; his early comments expressing disdain for using the military in the drug war appear give some reassurance that he won't champion an increased Pentagon role in Colombia. »
• Remarque intéressante, et évidemment prémonitoire, sur ce qui est devenu le principal sujet de crise au Pentagone : la modération des chefs militaires et la tension avec leurs chefs civils, à cause de cette modération contrastant avec le bellicisme des seconds.
« “It's entirely possible,” says a veteran Pentagon officials, “that the CINCs will see their interests better served by a closer-than-ever relationship with the State Department under Powell. In many respects, they're more moderate than the civilians in Congress and DoD.” »
'une façon générale, nous noterons que Jason Vest donne un portrait assez nettement idéologique de Rumsfeld (dans le sens du conservatisme radical, bien sûr), plus idéologique que celui que nous ferions pour le caractériser. Les événements donnent-ils raison à Vest ? Certains peuvent juger, avec beaucoup d'arguments, qu'on peut sans la moindre hésitation répondre par l'affirmative.
Quant à nous, nous plaiderons notre cause en indiquant que notre appréciation de Rumsfeld, — un manager extrêmement dur plus qu'un idéologue — explique aussi bien son évolution, qui semble plus idéologique, essentiellement après le 11 septembre. En fait, un manager US est aussi, de facto, un idéologue (tout aussi évidemment, conservateur extrémiste), mais pas un idéologue spéculateur ou théoricien (comme un Wolfowitz). Un idéologue-bulldozer, sans état d'âme.
Fin septembre 2001, alors qu'il expliquait la guerre contre le terrorisme, Rumsfeld précisait que cette guerre était faite, du côté US, principalement pour la défense de l'American Way of Life. C'est une parole de manager, idéologue, certes, mais comme tous les managers US.
D'autre part, — et nous sommes là sur le pur terrain de la conviction — notre appréciation, notre conviction justement, est que la grande affaire de Rumsfeld reste la transformation, c'est-à-dire la réforme de fond en comble du Pentagone. Notre conviction est aussi que la guerre d'Afghanistan (et le reste) sert à Rumsfeld d'abord comme argument dans sa bataille contre la bureaucratie et la hiérarchie militaire. Là, le manager parle avant l'idéologue.
[Les textes ci-dessous “Darth Rumsfeld et Punch-Drunk on Hardball ont été publiés dans Prospect, Volume 12, Issue 4. du 26 février 2001. Ces textes doivent être lus avec la mention classique à l'esprit, —
Par Jason Vest
Since Donald Rumsfeld's appointment as secretary of defense was announced on December 28, approbatory phrases have been the order of the day. The Washington Post cast him as ''elder statesman,'' while The New York Times characterized him as a ''tough-minded manager.'' At his January 11 confirmation hearing, the servile aria started by the press was taken up by the Senate Armed Services Committee: Save for a few pointed questions on fiscal oversight by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, Rumsfeld's hearing could have passed for a mannerly colloquy of academics discussing the future of defense. On January 20, moments after George W. Bush was sworn in, Donald Rumsfeld— ''Rummy,'' as he is known to his friends — was confirmed by the Senate.
To longtime defense policy observers and arms control advocates, watching the restoration of Rumsfeld to the Pentagon has been disconcerting. Though genuflected to by the Washington press corps and political establishment as a genteel graybeard, the real Rumsfeld may be, in fact, much closer to Darth Vader, both on defense issues and as a practitioner of politics. ''The notion that he's a gray eminence,'' laments William Hartung, the World Policy Institute's veteran defense analyst and a longtime Rumsfeld watcher, ''is, in large part, based on press laziness.''
During his confirmation hearings and in the press, there has been hardly any mention of Rumsfeld's participation in a slew of far-right organizations going back to the 1970s. Nor has there been any real acknowledgment that the watershed ballistic missile panel he headed in 1998 was not the levelheaded ''bipartisan'' effort it claimed to be but, rather, a distressing flashback to one of the most outrageous intelligence manipulations of the Cold War. That the supposedly ''moderate'' chairman of this commission had an egregious conflict of interest has also escaped attention.
And while a few profiles have made passing references to Rumsfeld's Machiavellian power politicking during the Ford era, few seem to comprehend just how formidable he is likely to be within the Bush administration. Indeed, there's a striking parallel between the new administration's power structure and the regime Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney effectively controlled nearly 30 years ago, in which the duo set up a dominant advisory axis to a perceptibly weak-on-national-security president, in part by marginalizing a high-profile secretary of state seen as too moderate. Back then, Rumsfeld had a reliable coterie of protégés and comrades he could depend on in the service of furthering his goals. Three decades later, a new generation of Rumsfeld admirers is obsessed with the idea that a completely effective nuclear missile defense system can be deployed, giving America the power to use ''peace through strength'' in dealing with the rest of the world.
In 1975, when Gerald Ford fired James Schlesinger from the Pentagon and replaced him with Donald Rumsfeld, Washington's hawks were apoplectic: While Schlesinger was an advocate of big defense spending, Rumsfeld was an unknown; worse, he was seen to be a sop to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
As the 1976 election approached, a Kissinger ally was not the best thing to be. Ford was running scared from archconservative Ronald Reagan and his supporters, who held that two of the Ford administration's higher profiles--Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller--were too liberal. (''Under Kissinger and Ford,'' Reagan intoned, ''this nation has become number two in a world where it is dangerous--if not fatal--to be second best.'') Conservatives were convinced that Kissinger's policy of détente with the Soviet Union would ultimately embolden the Russians to fight and win a nuclear world war.
So a friendly hawk phoned Rumsfeld and asked him if he had ever heard of Albert Wohlstetter, at the Rand Corporation. Rumsfeld said no. The friend told Rumsfeld to ask Wohlstetter to lunch--and to make sure the press knew about it. A low-profile but eminently influential shaper of nuclear strategy, Wohlstetter was spiritual godfather to the Cold War's atomic hawks; his Rand Corporation reports had been a guiding light to hard-line strategists since the 1950s. Wohlstetter flew in from Rand for a two-and-half-hour lunch with Rumsfeld--and ''the hawks were rapturous,'' says Rumsfeld's comrade.
His conservative credentials established, Rumsfeld began to chip away at Kissinger's access and public image. Some of Kissinger's partisans in the press corps found Rumsfeld's campaign against the K so heavy-handed they virtually outed him as Kissinger's nemesis, by making Rummy's identity as a Kissinger-bashing source obvious. Then, on November 1, 1975, Ford fired William Colby, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Schlesinger, the secretary of defense, replacing them with George H.W. Bush and Rumsfeld, respectively. Though Kissinger remained as secretary of state, Ford stripped him of his position as national-security adviser. The greatest ignominy, however, was yet to come.
This year, in his January 11 confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld told Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy that if President Bush wants arms reductions lower than required by treaty, he'd support the president. But, he added, he would ''offer his views'' to the contrary: ''I mean, people, honorable people, can come to different views, and I did with respect to SALT II.'' But the reality of SALT II--the second phase of the strategic-arms-limitation talks between the Soviet Union and the United States--belies Rumsfeld's gentle revisionism; in fact, Rumsfeld and his allies used hardball and subterfuge to kill the treaty and undermine Henry Kissinger.
In early December 1975, Ford and Kissinger embarked on a Pacific Rim swing. Afterward, Kissinger was going to head to Moscow, hoping to conclude negotiations for SALT II. En route to Jakarta from Hong Kong, however, Rumsfeld cabled Air Force One, rebuking Kissinger for even considering a Moscow trip without consulting Rumsfeld and others. Kissinger's Russia sojourn was nixed. Then, on December 6, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that a number of Ford advisers were ''outraged'' at Kissinger's ''drafting top secret proposals for major concessions to Moscow.'' The column implied that only one man could save the republic from the betrayal of giving away the nuclear farm: Donald Rumsfeld.
Though the sources for the Evans and Novak column were anonymous, those in the know had little trouble divining who they were. A small group of conservative arms control opponents in the executive and legislative branches known as ''the cabal'' was becoming increasingly, if quietly, effective. To them — Richard Perle, an aide to Democratic Senator Henry ''Scoop'' Jackson of Washington (and the son-in-law of Wohlstetter); U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) Deputy Director John Lehman; and Lieutenant General Edward Rowny, among others — Rumsfeld was an ally, and the antithesis of Kissinger, whose ideas of ''détente'' and ''rapprochement'' were anathema.
Ford thought he could protect himself from Ronald Reagan and satisfy the defense establishment hawks in both parties by nixing SALT II. Later, Ford's other advisers felt the move cost him the 1976 election. And in a 1988 interview, the former president wasn't shy about explaining why SALT II died. ''The attitude in the Defense Department,'' he said, ''made it impossible to proceed in the environment of 1976.''
By March 1976, the word détente had disappeared from Gerald Ford's vocabulary. Meanwhile, a group of like-minded gentlemen continued to meet at Washington's exclusive Metropolitan Club for a series of discussions on what to do about the menace of détente and, in their view, the insatiable Soviet Union.
Out of these meetings came the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), whose existence revolved around the die-hard belief that the United States was failing to keep pace with the Soviet war machine. Though originally seen as an extremist organization, the group — which included a number of Rumsfeld's adepts and comrades-in-arms — managed to prevail upon the Ford administration to let its members have access to CIA data in the service of providing an ''alternative'' assessment of the Soviet threat.
In CPD's view, the agency chronically minimized the Soviet military threat, thus creating a false basis for what CPD saw as insufficient U.S. defense expenditures. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was pushing hard for new strategic endeavors, such as the MX missile and the B-1 bomber. Though William Colby had successfully fought against outside analysis, new CIA Director George Bush was much more receptive to the suggestion from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board — which included CPD members — that the agency's analysts hadn't been on the ball. It was no surprise, then, that when Bush asked the White House for permission to bring in the CPD, he obtained an enthusiastic response.
The CPD experts, who by this point had come to be known as ''Team B,'' crafted an assessment that,
The findings were submitted to the White House too late to be of any use to the floundering Gerald Ford, but CPD mounted an incredibly effective media campaign of leaking and spinning to create something approaching public hysteria. Despite Kissinger's condemnation of Team B's assessment, Rumsfeld was effusive in promoting it as a credible study — and thereby undermining arms control efforts for the next four years. Two days before Jimmy Carter's inauguration, Rumsfeld fired parting shots at Kissinger and other disarmament advocates, saying that ''no doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces'' and that those capabilities ''indicate a tendency toward war fighting ... rather than the more modish Western models of deterrence through mutual vulnerability.''
Team B's efforts not only were effective in undermining the incoming Carter administration's disarmament efforts but also laid the foundation for the unnecessary explosion of the defense budget in the Reagan years. And it was during those years that virtually all of Rumsfeld's compatriots were elevated to positions of power in the executive branch. From there they defended programs Rumsfeld had pushed, like the MX and the B-1. Though he did a brief turn as special envoy to the Middle East in 1983 and 1984, Rummy also had another quiet and influential role: adviser to Eugene V. Rostow, veteran Cold Warrior and head of the ACDA. When Reagan fired Rostow in 1983, the president replaced him with another of Rumsfeld's protégés: Kenneth Adelman, whose entire defense experience had consisted of one year spent as a Rumsfeld special assistant at the Pentagon. Not surprisingly, Rumsfeld continued on as a member of ACDA's advisory board.
Rumsfeld maintained a presence in Washington during the Reagan years (and briefly contemplated a presidential run, in 1987), but under Bush, Rumsfeld was less welcome. When his name was floated as a prospective member for a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel, the White House batted it down almost immediately. Though Bush and Rumsfeld had helped midwife the Team B project, relations between the two were not exactly warm; indeed, many believed that Rumsfeld had advocated recalling Bush from his diplomatic post in China to head the CIA so that Bush — once he was ensconced in a job not tailored to furthering political ambition — would be neutralized as a vice presidential rival to Rumsfeld in 1976.
During the Bush years, Rumsfeld contented himself with being chairman of the Committee for the Free World (CFW), a repository of right-wing defense hawks. In addition to alerting the nation to the continued red menace in Central America, CFW also sold numerous publications extolling the virtuous brilliance of Reagan's Star Wars program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Rumsfeld also sat on the board of fellow CPD member Leo Cherne's International Rescue Committee, the antileftist human rights organization effusive in its support of right-wing regimes all over the world. And Rumsfeld joined up with William Bennett's Empower America.
In the post-Cold War world, Rumsfeld's name often appeared as a signatory on letters opposing various forms of arms control, including the chemical weapons ban. But Rumsfeld has only recently reasserted himself as a patron saint of the Star Warrior lobby. In 1996 he occupied a quiet but pivotal position as Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole's campaign chairman and defense adviser, ensuring that Dole made the latest incarnation of Star Wars a campaign centerpiece. According to candidate Dole, America's ''top defense priority'' had to be national missile defense (NMD), a scaled-down version of Reagan's SDI.
But intelligence data and analysis didn't bear out the necessity of rapid NMD deployment. In 1995 the CIA reported in a national intelligence estimate that a nuclear missile threat from a new foreign power was at least 15 years away. At this point, Rumsfeld acolyte Frank Gaffney, Jr., of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), mounted a campaign against the CIA's estimates; with the aid of right-wing congressional Republicans, he successfully pushed for the establishment of an outside group to provide an alternative assessment to the CIA's— in effect, another Team B.
This time, however, the team — headed by ex-CIA Director Robert Gates — essentially concurred with the national intelligence estimate. So Gaffney prevailed upon the minions of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich for yet another assessment. Thus the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States was born, with Donald Rumsfeld as chair. Widely characterized as ''bipartisan in its conclusions,'' the final Rumsfeld commission report was, for all intents and purposes, a Team B redux: The CIA, the report concluded, was wrong, and the very real threat of ICBM attack from a ''rogue state'' was at most five, not 15, years off. Such an event, said the report, could occur with ''little or no warning.''
Scores of experts have since taken issue with the report's analysis, noting that key variables and scenarios were given short shrift or were unexamined by the commission. ''There are two different takes on the Rumsfeld report,'' says veteran defense analyst John Pike, now of GlobalSecurity.org. ''One of them is that it basically helped define the conventional wisdom, that there was basically a bipartisan consensus that missile defense was no longer controversial.'' The other view, he says, is that the report is one of the greatest travesties in the history of the intelligence community.
Team B at least looked at data before trying ''to discover new and more alarming facts and place the most pessimistic interpretation on them,'' says Pike. ''The Rumsfeld Report basically says, 'We have no interest in examining what's probably going to happen in these other countries.' Rather than basing policy on intelligence estimates of what will probably happen politically and economically and what the bad guys really want, it's basing policy on that which is not physically impossible. This is really an extraordinary epistemological conceit, which is applied to no other realm of national policy, and if manifest in a single human being would be diagnosed as paranoid.''
While the report didn't explicitly recommend the deployment of NMD, there was no doubt about the commission's desire to see the system--which Bill Clinton had vetoed--put back into play. Making the situation even more unbelievable was the lack of outrage over Rumsfeld's ties to Gaffney and CSP, which gets a goodly amount of its funding from defense contractors making money off the NMD program. In 1998 Gaffney gave Rumsfeld CSP's ''Keeper of the Flame'' Award for producing the document that revitalized the Reagan Star Wars concept. At that point, William Hartung and others believe, the commission's report should have been tanked. ''It's somewhat of a tribute to the way he operates,'' says Hartung, ''that he's able to get away with all this.''
Hartung says that SDI haunts the Democrats because ''they're afraid if they don't support missile defense they'll be outflanked from the right. But this is so far out of step with what most people are thinking about these days. And as a result, we're not getting the debate we need to have.''
Perhaps worst of all, for missile defense to become a reality, the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty needs to be amended — something the Russians are not eager to do. No matter, says Rumsfeld; at his confirmation hearings, he dismissed the ABM treaty as ''ancient history'' and said he had no compunction about abrogating it.
This is troubling to longtime investigative analysts like Hartung and Pike, who view such a move as provoking a new, wholly unnecessary arms race with new nuclear actors. However often NMD is cast as a benign ''defensive'' measure, the fact remains that it is a weapon whose deployment would likely cause other countries to build up their forces in an effort to overwhelm it. This is, says Pike, a good reason to put the brakes on.
Moreover, for NMD to work as leverage in countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan— which are afraid of attacks from Iraq or North Korea, for example —''everyone has to be convinced that it will work,'' says Pike. ''And nothing to date shows that it will.''
How all this will play out in the new administration remains to be seen. But if history is any indicator, there's likely to be some friction between Rumsfeld and the new secretary of state, Colin Powell. During the Ford administration, Rumsfeld masterfully neutralized many political and policy rivals, creating a national-security advisory chain that ran from himself to Cheney to Ford, with the once-mighty Kissinger cut down to size.
For George W. Bush, an administration without Colin Powell was unthinkable. But Powell is viewed with suspicion by many on the right, over everything from Iraq policy to missile defense. He has an appeal and a constituency broader than either Bush's or Cheney's. ''On both counts — politics and policy — Powell scares them a little,'' says a senior Republican operative close to the Bush White House. ''They wanted someone committed to missile defense and who can go toe-to-toe with Powell,'' who is not known to be an enthusiastic supporter of an expansive NMD program.
When the Bush administration was hunting for a new secretary of defense, Powell's recommendation, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, was eliminated for being insufficiently pro-missile defense: Once, during his congressional service, he voted to shave some money from NMD. Trent Lott's choice, former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, proved himself unworthy to Bush and Cheney by asking if he would be second fiddle to Powell. (''Reasonable question, but if you had to ask and couldn't assert, that's the end of it,'' says the GOP operative.) Paul Wolfowitz, a star Rumsfeld protégé, was in the middle of a complicated divorce.
It's difficult not to see Cheney as the forceful hand behind the Rumsfeld appointment. Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration will be unlike any other, with Bush as chairman and Cheney as CEO, or Bush as president and Cheney as prime minister (with oversight of the defense and diplomacy portfolios). In a sense, it's Ford all over again: Rummy back at the Pentagon, Cheney as the sitting president's right hand, and a secretary of state who's potential trouble. That Powell's recommendations for secretary of defense died early on, and that his suggestion for Rumsfeld's number two at the Pentagon — his old friend Richard Armitage, seen by many in Rummy's circle as a dangerous moderate — was also shot down, recalls some familiar executive maneuvering.
John Pike says defense watchers are keeping a close eye on whether the cabinet secretaries fill their senior staff positions with ''the mad dogs and hard-line ideologues.'' There's potential for more blasts from the past: Even if they don't return to government in official capacities, the likes of Gaffney and Perle will doubtless be called on as advisers or sounding boards, and they may enjoy greater access and influence than they have in years.
Yet Rumsfeld and Cheney's Ford years won't necessarily translate to a repeat performance. Jude Wanniski, a former hawk who has known or worked with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Powell over the last 30 years, says that while concern over the return of the Wohlstetter followers is merited (''If defense and security types are like watchdogs, Perle and Wolfowitz are Dobermans, and Gaffney's a Doberman with no sense at all,'' he says), there is in fact some balance on the national-security axis: ''Powell is on one side, Rumsfeld on the other, with Cheney in the middle, seeing that every perspective is engaged.''
But does Rumsfeld have ambitions beyond the Pentagon? Kissinger recently told that he has buried the hatchet with Rumsfeld, and that he believes his former adversary will concentrate on his stewardship of the Defense Department. Yet Cheney's heart ailments raise the specter of what would happen if the vice president were to die in office. Cheney's position as national-security arbiter in the unique Bush command structure would be a coveted slot for both Rumsfeld and Powell. Each man has his champions, and either one could leave his department in the capable hands of his deputies. Time will tell whom the force is with, but given his past, there's no doubt that Rumsfeld is comfortable holding a light saber for the dark side.
Par Jason Vest
When Gerald Ford fired James Schlesinger from the Pentagon in 1975 and replaced him with Donald Rumsfeld, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater — a fan of Schlesinger's owing to the latter's advocacy of massive defense expenditure — angrily asked Ford what qualified Rumsfeld to run the Department of Defense. As The New Republic's John Osborne reported at the time, Ford's entire answer consisted of the following: ''He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War.''
Rumsfeld did actually have a tad more experience with defense issues than his naval aviator days, as ambassador to NATO since 1973. When Congress began to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment, however, Rumsfeld — who actually had his own little plumbers-type unit at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969, charged with sniffing out ''revolutionaries'' who might disburse federal funds to ''subversives'' — offered to resign and help the beleaguered president fight for survival. (Nixon declined.)
At the time, some held that if Nixon had tilted more towards Rumsfeld and Robert Finch earlier on, rather than Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the president might have avoided Watergate entirely. But if Haldeman's diaries are any indicator, Nixon found Rumsfeld to be admirably Machiavellian. On May 21, 1970, as Nixon was fuming about disloyalty in the cabinet and contemplating a purge, Rumsfeld pointed out that a record of trying to work things out with the recalcitrant secretaries had to be established before firing them. The next line in Haldeman's entry: ''[Nixon] Wants Don Rumsfeld brought more into the inner councils.''
Though Nixon and Haldeman wanted Rumsfeld to take the GOP chairmanship in 1972 and run for Senate in Illinois, Rumsfeld seemed intent on staying in the executive branch, much to Haldeman's annoyance. (Rumsfeld, Haldeman wrote, had agreed with Ehrlichman that he should run for Senate, but then told Nixon, ''that just wouldn't do, that he had to have an administration job for a year, which was a complete shock to the P[resident] and E[hrlichman], and typical Rumsfeld, rather slimy maneuver.'') Off he went to NATO, apparently hoping for something bigger later in the administration, but not a White House staff job. After Nixon's resignation, however, Ford prevailed upon Rumsfeld to come back as his chief of staff — though according to rumors that were anemically denied, only for a set period of time. According to Osborne (whose prodigious reporting became one of the definitive accounts of the Ford Administration), Rumsfeld ''wanted an assignment with a political future and White House staff positions, however exalted, seldom offered that.'' The conventional wisdom held that after a certain interval, Ford would slide Rumsfeld into a cabinet post.
Once at the White House, the Rummy didn't even want to be called ''chief of staff,'' but ''coordinator.'' As ''coordinator,'' however, Rumsfeld wielded a tremendous amount of power, and did it with gusto. In addition to firing two of Betty Ford's secretaries, he was seen by many as moving to isolate Ford from longtime associates, like speechwriter Robert Hartmann. (''He's another Bob Haldeman,'' a White House staffer said at the time, ''only he smiles.'') Also considered to have vice-presidential aspirations for 1976, the Rummy saw to it that Nelson Rockefeller's staff was cut to the bone, and later, in Rockefeller's implicit view, orchestrated a subversive campaign to erode his political base.
A series of uncomplimentary White House leaks and unflattering public remarks about Rockefeller by Ford campaign operative Howard Callaway was too much for Rockefeller, who angrily confronted ''the coordinator.'' Rumsfeld vociferously denied having anything to do with the leaks, but, as Osborne reported, Rockefeller's response — ''he said rather coldly that he had no choice but to take Rumsfeld's denials and assurances at face value'' — did not telegraph faith in Rumsfeld's veracity. Consensus, Osborne wrote, was that the Rummy might know a bit more than he let on: ''Rumsfeld, who hoped in 1974 that he would be Mr. Ford's choice for appointment to the vice presidency, professes to hold Nelson Rockefeller in the highest esteem and to have no designs on the 1976 nomination [but] Rockefeller and his principal assistants are aware that Rumsfeld and his deputy Richard Cheney are actually running the President's pre-nomination campaign and that Callaway gets most of his orders from them.''
As such, no one had heard an ''expression of admiration and affection for Donald Rumsfeld in Nelson Rockefeller's vicinity.'' By fall of 1975, Rockefeller was out as the 1976 vice presidential nominee. By this time, Rumsfeld was concentrating on taking out another target: Henry Kissinger.
Though Ford had implored Kissinger to stay on in his administration, Rumsfeld began to chip away at Kissinger's access and public perception. Rumsfeld was frequently chatty with reporters on diplomatic missions so long as they quoted him only as a ''senior American official.'' Some of Kissinger's partisans in the press corps found Rumsfeld's campaign against the K so heavy-handed they virtually outed him as Kissinger's nemesis. On the flight back from a European meeting on Air Force One, they attributed deep background remarks to ''a senior American official very familiar with NATO who was traveling with the President,'' thus leaving little doubt as to who was gunning for the K. ''What had become clear,'' John Newhouse wrote in War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, was that ''Ford was taking advice from Rumsfeld on policy questions, which meant he was taking political advice from him, because policy and presidential politics had converged.''
Ironically, it was less than 10 years later that Rumsfeld's name was being bandied about as a candidate for Kissinger's old job, Secretary of State. On the heels of his 1983 appointment by Ronald Reagan as the Special Envoy to the Middle East, conventional wisdom held that if George Shultz decided to retire, Rumsfeld was his likely — and personally favored — replacement. Alas for Rumsfeld, the six months he spent shuttling between the capitals of the Arab world demonstrated that when it came to diplomacy, he wasn't ready for prime time. However tough and effective Rumsfeld was in previous incarnations, he met his match — perhaps for the only time in his career — in Hafez Assad.
Essentially charged with getting the Syrians, Israelis, Palestinians and U.S.-trained Lebanese army and militia units to abide by a May 17, 1983, accord calling for cadre withdrawals from Lebanon, Rumsfeld would spent late 1983 and early 1984 trying to further the Reagan Administration's policy of propping up Amin Gemayl's floundering Phalangist presidency. As the Reagan policy amounted to support for Israel's 1982 invasion and occupation (under Ariel Sharon's direction) of southern Lebanon, Assad told Shultz that Syria wasn't going to withdraw its troops. Though Syria wouldn't accept the May 17 deal, the U.S. seemed to believe the country could eventually be brought to heel, and sought to do so through repeated shelling of Lebanon — an action which (a) had the affect of radicalizing Muslims and Arabs in Lebanon and elsewhere, and (b) begetting the car bomb attack which killed U.S. Marines in their Beirut compound.
On his first two visits to Damascus after his November 1983 appointment, Assad wouldn't even deign to meet with Rumsfeld — a clear diplomatic slight. Assad later added insult to injury by having a productive meeting with Jesse Jackson. Devoid of ''special envoy'' status, Jackson flew to Syria and successfully secured the release of downed American Navy flier Robert Goodman, who was shot down in December 1983 during a U.S. retaliatory raid against the Syrians for firing on U.S. reconnaissance aircraft. Both Assad and Jackson made much of the fact that Rumsfeld had never even mentioned Goodman's name on his previous visits.
Chagrined, Rumsfeld and others responded that they hadn't discussed Goodman for fear the Syrians would seek to use his release as a bargaining chip in the troop withdrawal negotiations. As reports from the time reveal, veteran diplomats and Arabists found this absurd; it seemed clear to them that Rumsfeld and Shultz were in far over their heads, oblivious to the nuances and complexities of Mideast geopolitics. It wasn't just that they had failed to grasp that the Syrians could not be compelled to accept the May 17 accords, career diplomats explained at the time; Rumsfeld and others didn't get Syrian diplomacy, which is usually only responsive to repeated visits from a knowledgeable Secretary of State.
By the time Assad met with Rumsfeld in January 1984 on the latter's third trip to Damascus, Reagan's Lebanon policy was already in tatters, and Assad stuck to his guns: There would be absolutely no Syrian withdrawal until all the Israelis, as well as the battered multinational peacekeeping force of Americans, Italians, Britons and French, pulled out. As it became clearer that the administration had set itself up for failure by backing one group of combatants while insisting the U.S. was in fact an honest broker, congressional Democrats who had voted to extend the U.S. Marine presence in Lebanon began to shift their views. The Rumsfeld and Shultz response: Charge the congressional critics with aiding Syria at the U.S.'s expense. According to a career U.S. diplomat interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor, this was more than a stretch. The blame, he said, lay with Rumsfeld, Shultz and the White House staff. ''We never understood that we didn't have the assets to carry out the macho policy we were launched on,'' he said, explaining that ''there was an assumption in the administration that just about anyone can handle foreign policy.''
Rumsfeld — who had said from the beginning that he'd only do the Middle East gig for six months — resigned in May, with little to show for his efforts except an emboldened and resolute Assad. Though all of this happened 16 years ago, some observers hold that the episode highlights a Rumsfeld weakness, especially in today's world: an inability to appreciate the subtleties of situations where American power and force, however looming they might appear, won't work, or are likely to create more problems than they solve. In some respects, he may have learned his lesson; his early comments expressing disdain for using the military in the drug war appear give some reassurance that he won't champion an increased Pentagon role in Colombia.
But whether or not Rumsfeld really appreciates the complications of tending to the Latin America part of his portfolio remains to be seen. He inherits de facto stewardship of the controversial Plan Colombia, and at a time when Brazil, Panama and Venezuela are growing increasingly opposed to U.S. military aid and intervention in Colombia while Ecuador is actively seeking it (and the infusion of U.S. dollars). And most of Latin America still harbors intense suspicions that the U.S. seeks post Cold War hegemony, through a combination of U.S.-supported neoliberal economic policies and ''counternarcotics'' assistance. As most inter-American policy has been meted out between the Treasury Department, the U.S. Trade Representative and the Defense Department, over the past eight years — with Foggy Bottom on the sidelines — it's not hard to see why the view is persistent.
And it's not just a view exclusive to Latin America. In the past decade, the U.S.'s regional overseas military heads — the Commanders in Chief, or CINCS, of the Southern, Central, Pacific and European Commands — has increasingly eclipsed the State Department in the realm of foreign relations. As international security policy is hashed out, the most crucial players may become the CINCS. While these proconsuls are a new variable for Rumsfeld — their legislated elevation of authority came in 1986, a decade after Rumsfeld left the Pentagon — Powell knows them and their system quite well.
''It's entirely possible,'' says a veteran Pentagon officials, ''that the CINCs will see their interests better served by a closer-than-ever relationship with the State Department under Powell. In many respects, they're more moderate than the civilians in Congress and DoD.''
While Rumsfeld's clique is hot on missile defense, weaponizing space, demonizing China and funding the Iraqi opposition, there are career officers and civilians leery of weapons programs with a ridiculous burn rate, who don't see a need to create additional enemies. Their views are closer to Powell's, and how they interface across bureaucratic lines will be interesting to watch. ''If Powell and Rumsfeld come together and say, 'Let's use the collective capability of Defense and State and the power of the CINCs to do cohesive and coherent things in the service of sound policy,' it could be pretty awesome,'' the Pentagon veteran says. ''But that depends on a lot of factors that aren't clear yet, and the picture could be much more fractured. Because one of the problems with defense modernization figuring out who the fuck the enemy is. Expect Rumsfeld and his people to create enemies.''
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