Senior military officers referred to it as “the 7,000-mile screwdriver. That was their way of describing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s penchant for micromanaging aspects of the Iraq War that interested him. And it’s one reason why the military will be happy today that Rumsfeld is leaving – even happier, maybe, than Democrats, who have claimed an early scalp for their election victory. To the end, even when Rumsfeld must have known that his time in the job was short, he wouldn’t give up that option to meddle with his field commanders. When Marine Gen. James Jones, the retiring Nato commander, went to see Rumsfeld a few weeks ago to talk about becoming commander of US Central Command, he asked whether Rumsfeld intended to continue his direct line of communication with the theater commander, Gen. George Casey, sometimes bypassing Centcom. When Rumsfeld wouldn’t rule out such contacts, Jones began to doubt the Centcom job would work. And when Rumsfeld said he didn’t foresee significant changes in Iraq strategy, Jones withdrew his name from consideration. Changes in Iraq are coming, and Rumsfeld’s departure is, to paraphrase the prayer book, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual process. The Bush administration in recent weeks has – very much in secret – begun to ask itself the unutterable question: Is the Iraq strategy working? Can we achieve our goals with the tools we have? If not, how do we adjust the tools and goals so that they fit? Rumsfeld long ago became the symbol for a war he began to doubt at least three years ago when he wrote his famous memo predicting that Iraq would be a “long, hard slog. That memo illustrated the best of Rumsfeld’s intellectual style: He asked whether US tactics were creating new terrorists faster than we were killing the existing ones and mused: “Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough? That was the upside of Rumsfeld – a willingness to question received wisdom, a penchant for challenging the pet projects of the military, like the army’s plan to build a monster artillery piece, inaptly named the “Crusader, which would be difficult to move quickly to any modern battlefield. Rumsfeld was convinced that the US Army needed to became more mobile, agile and expeditionary. The army accepted some of his ideas about transformation, but deep down, senior generals were convinced that his policies would break the institution. Oddly enough, it was the generals who helped keep Rumsfeld in his job. The White House had decided last spring that it was time to make a change at the Pentagon, and officials were steeling themselves to break the news to Rumsfeld when the “generals’ revolt erupted on newspaper op-ed pages, with former officers lining up to denounce their ex-boss. The White House decided it couldn’t appear to bow to pressure and retreated. Rumsfeld’s gift was his brilliance and intellectual toughness. He kept his head up, even as the war in Iraq went from bad to awful. In that, he was a harder man even than one of his predecessors, Robert McNamara, who in his final year running the Vietnam War began to crack privately under the pressure. Rumsfeld embodied the prep school injunction: Never let them see you sweat. But the downside with Rumsfeld was so great that few people are likely to remember the upside. Robert Gates will bring to the job the attentive style of a listener. He rose at the CIA in the early 1980s by making himself indispensable to his boss, William Casey. He was the brightest Soviet analyst in the shop, so Casey soon appointed him deputy director overseeing his fellow analysts. I once waded through Gates’ doctoral dissertation in Soviet studies at Georgetown University. It was a work of solid, earnest scholarship – good, but not flashy. Rumsfeld might have described it as a long, hard slog. But it illustrates Gates’ best qualities: His intellectual seriousness, his professionalism, his lack of “side, as the British say of good civil servants. Gates represents the ascension of President George H.W. Bush’s people and ideas to his son’s administration. Bush Sr. rescued Gates after he was rejected as CIA director in 1987 because of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, bringing him to the National Security Council staff and then appointing him CIA director in 1991. Gates is not a turfy person – he “plays well with others – a quality that Rumsfeld often lacked. Gates will bring something else to the table, and it may be a crucial factor in the months ahead. He came back into the Bush administration’s spotlight because of his work as a member of the Iraq Study Group, headed by Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton. Gates embodies the group’s effort to find a bipartisan policy for Iraq. In that sense, he will go to the Pentagon with an invisible mission statement that can be summed up in two words: “Exit Strategy. He won’t want to leave Iraq quickly or dangerously, but unlike Rumsfeld, he won’t fight the problem.
Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR
