[Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Rumsfeld and the big picture - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Rumsfeld and the big picture

By James Carroll  |  March 27, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

''FORTUNATELY, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on 
websites, or the latest sensational attack," Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a 
Washington Post op-ed column last week. ''History is a bigger picture, 
and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately."

Rumsfeld was arguing that any evaluation of the present catastrophe in 
Iraq should take a longer view, and I agree with him. Indeed, I have 
spent the last six years exploring two generations' worth of events and 
decisions that brought us here. I have written a long history of the 
Pentagon called ''House of War," which will be published in May. But 
contrary to what Rumsfeld hopes, such a ''bigger picture" in no way 
exonerates him or the Bush administration for its grave failures. The 
disaster in Iraq both recapitulates American mistakes of the past and 
worsens them immeasurably.

Let's begin with Rumsfeld himself. In 1975, he was Gerald Ford's 
secretary of defense when the USS Mayaguez was seized off Cambodia by 
the newly empowered Khmer Rouge, whose ascendance followed the 
destabilizing US ''incursion." The American crew of 38 was captured.

Rumsfeld shaped the response -- which was to ignore diplomacy, begin 
bombing a Cambodian port city, and dispatch a large force of Marines to 
rescue the crew. Bad moves based on bad intelligence. While untold 
Cambodian civilians were bombed, 40 American rescuers were killed in an 
attack on an island where the crew was thought to be held. In fact, the 
American sailors had already been released unharmed and set adrift on a 
Thai fishing vessel. The Mayaguez affair was a dress rehearsal for 
Rumsfeld's war in Iraq.

The Iraq war breaks with American tradition by being explicitly defined 
as ''preventive," but in other ways it fulfills the core tradition -- 
the eschewing of diplomacy in favor of war preparation, and wars, whose 
real purpose is to feed the insatiable appetite of the economic, 
political, and cultural behemoth on the Potomac. The Pentagon is 63 
years old: Key moments in its lifetime cry out to be freshly understood.

Why, after the disappearance of America's Cold War enemy in the early 
1990s, did Washington maintain its huge Cold War military? In what 
sense, for that matter, did the United States ''win" the Cold War, when 
its structures were overwhelmingly dismantled by the other side?

By what right did the United States come out of the energy crisis of the 
1970s proclaiming, with the Carter Doctrine, its intention to use 
military force to protect access to Persian Gulf oil? Jimmy Carter, too, 
is a progenitor of the war in Iraq.

In reviewing an arms race that led, across 40 years, to the accumulation 
of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, when will the United States reckon 
with the truth that Washington held the initiative at almost every stage 
of that escalation, with Moscow forever struggling to catch up? What 
does it say about America that the United States led the way up this 
mountain of horror, with Moscow, under Mikhail Gorbachev, leading the 
way down?

What is revealed by the ''retirement syndrome," in Robert Jay Lifton's 
phrase -- the consistent phenomenon of men whose careers shaped the 
national security state, only to denounce its assumptions as they left 
power? This is true not only of legions of generals and admirals, but of 
statesmen like Henry L. Stimson and George Kennan, civilian hawks like 
Robert S. McNamara and Paul Nitze, and presidents like Dwight D. 
Eisenhower, who famously decried the ''military-industrial complex" he 
had just created.

What does it say that, as pressures periodically built to rein in 
Pentagon budgets and influence, new threats and enemies were 
conveniently discovered, ''rescuing" the Pentagon, as Dean Acheson said 
of the North Korean invasion of South Korea? Ho Chi Minh, Manuel 
Noriega, and Saddam Hussein were such rescuers, and so was Osama bin 
Laden. Now comes Iran.

How did the impulse to demonize the enemy in Moscow paralyze American 
strategic and political thinking? This psychological imprisonment was so 
complete that the demonizing mindset carried over into the new century, 
when dreaded ''communism" was replaced by ''terrorism." George W. Bush 
did not invent this myopia.

Iraq shows how self-destructive were the responses of Americans and 
their government to the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. They were not new, but 
flowed along a channel through which powerful currents had been running 
for 60 years.

The point of history's bigger picture, however, is to see that, as human 
choices shaped this terrible outcome, human choices can change it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/27/rumsfeld_and_the_big_picture/
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