The Rumsfeld Memo
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in History, The War On Terrorism, WarIf only he could show us the memo.“It’s still classified, I suppose?” says Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, looking toward his assistant.
“It’s still classified,” Lawrence DiRita replies, “along with a lot of the underlying planning.”
Rumsfeld nods, apparently disappointed. He is interested in sharing the memo because the memo, as he outlines it, demonstrates that his critics are utterly mistaken. He did not dash heedless and underprepared into Iraq. Rumsfeld foresaw the things that could go wrong — and not just foresaw them, but wrote them up in a classically Rumsfeldian list, one brisk bullet point after another, 29 potential pitfalls in all. Then he distributed the memo at the highest levels, fed it into the super-secret planning process and personally walked the president through the warnings.
“It would have been probably October of ‘02, and the war was March, I think,” of the following year, Rumsfeld explains. “I sat down, and I said, ‘What are all the things that one has to anticipate could be a problem?’ And circulated it and read it to the president — sent it to the president. Gave it to the people in the department, and they planned against those things. And all of the likely and unlikely things that one could imagine are listed there. It was just on the off-chance we’d end up having a conflict. We didn’t know at that stage.”
However, does this really excuse anybody from poor pre-war planning and post-war execution? It’s not enough to identify the problems. You must also have a robust plan to carry them out.
But there is broad agreement now that if the United States salvages a victory in Iraq, it will come in spite of the initial war planning, not because of it. Rumsfeld’s own advisory think tank, the Defense Science Board, took a long look at this issue last year and concluded that the architects of the Iraq war — led by Rumsfeld — lacked necessary knowledge of Iraq and its people, and that they failed to factor in well-known lessons of history.“It is clear that Americans who waged the war and who have attempted to mold the aftermath have had no clear idea of the framework that has molded the personalities and attitudes of Iraqis,” the board declared in a report bearing the official seal of the Department of Defense. “It might help if Americans and their leaders were to show less arrogance and more understanding of themselves and their place in history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans display a consistent amnesia concerning their own past, as well as the history of those around them.”
If that last paragraph doesn’t make you want to read the whole thing, I don’t know what will. This isn’t about beating up on America. This is about making America smarter, and safer, for future generations to come.
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