Insight on the News - Politics Issue: 12/10/01

Rumsfeld: Plagues of Biblical Job By J. Michael Waller

As the Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan imploded under military and diplomatic pressures carefully coordinated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the president's national-security team, a disgusted senior Defense Department official summed up the plagues of the Clinton defense bureaucracy that Rumsfeld had inherited. "This is the only building in Washington that doesn't know we're at war," the official said, ticking off examples of what the Clinton years did to the military culture there:

A remote-controlled aircraft had a perfect shot to eliminate Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the main sponsor of terrorist Osama bin Laden. But Gen. Tommy Franks, chief of the Central Command who runs the war in Afghanistan from the U.S., called in a lawyer and let the Taliban fanatic escape on the advice of legal counsel.

Less than a week into the bombing campaign against the Taliban, Navy top brass found troubling rogue activity aboard the USS Enterprise in the Arabian Sea. A sailor was caught writing an antigay slogan on a bomb to be dropped on the Taliban. Back in Washington, senior admirals ordered fleet commanders to "prevent a recurrence of this unfortunate event."

On the Pentagon Website (www.defenselink.mil), a major source of information about the war against terrorism, a rotating banner gives equal billing to news about Operation Enduring Freedom and Native American Heritage Month. In addition to week-old photos from the war front, the site currently features "delicious foods and recipes from Native American Indian tribes" and a pulsating "dream catcher" complete with audio pagan chants.

War or no war, political correctness continues to reign in the U.S. military. Rumsfeld is said to have exploded when that Pentagon lawyer saved the life of bin Laden's chief sponsor, making it painfully clear to the political generals that George W. Bush, not Bill Clinton, is their commander in chief. It's been a protracted, uphill battle for Rumsfeld since he returned to the Defense Department last winter. Some liken his tribulations to the trials of the biblical Job. Others admiringly paint him as a hero who, at age 68, ditched a comfortable retirement to embrace a crushing 14-hour-a-day, six-and-a-half-day work week. Bush appointees interviewed by Insight say that though the schedule is grueling, they take great satisfaction in following Rumsfeld's lead. And among uniformed personnel, sickened by Clintonista holdovers, Insight found officers who are downright pumped.

Rumsfeld inherited a demoralized armed forces stretched thin on seemingly aimless and endless peacekeeping missions from Haiti to Bosnia. Its enlisted personnel and their families often were forced to live in slum conditions, and there had been a fire-hose exodus of highly trained and skilled people. Top military and civilian leaders had arrived at their posts under a promotion system and standards set by the Clinton administration, where critics say political correctness, not warrior qualities, led to professional advancement.

Rumsfeld had to force his top generals to stop thinking like Bill Clinton. The Joint Chiefs of Staff's original attack options against the Taliban, drawn up under the previous administration, consisted only of cruise-missile strikes. Rumsfeld bluntly told his generals that the plans were bullshit and to go back and draw up something that would crush the regime and the destroy terrorists. "He doesn't take any B.S.," says a senior officer who recently presented the secretary with an action proposal. "He'll tell you exactly what he thinks, but he does it in a human way that makes you appreciate his judgment, even if it's painful."

The 23,000-strong Pentagon bureaucracy has resented and resisted Rumsfeld's commitment to a total reconfiguring of the armed forces to face new and emerging threats. Big consulting firms meanwhile keep ex-Clinton officials wired into the defense decisionmaking apparatus on fat Pentagon contracts. The contractor monitoring foreign media, the Rendon Group, had a multimillion-dollar arrangement worked out before Bush took office. It recently tried to hire former Clinton White House operative Paul Begala to work the account. Insight has learned that an order from Bush's gutsy political director, Karl Rove, blocked the attempt.

Despite its size and budget, the Pentagon had no national-security strategy when Rumsfeld arrived and he has fought every day to get one. "It simply didn't exist," a Pentagon policy official tells Insight. "We didn't have one. The Quadrennial Defense Review hasn't provided it yet. It's not in the projections for the years 2010 and 2020. There's nothing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The existing materials contain no vocabulary of information strategy, threat environment or the stakes for the country."

How could this happen? For his first half-year as defense secretary, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were the only two presidentially appointed officials in the Pentagon. The Senate failed to approve other deputies until July, meaning that day-to-day policy through the summer lay in the hands of Clinton holdovers, many of whom had burrowed into the permanent bureaucracy and have sniped at President Bush's appointees since day one. Rumsfeld relied on some dedicated, forward-looking cadres in the building, led by Andy Marshall of the Office of Net Assessment, and outside Reaganite experts such as Richard Perle and William Schneider (now heading official advisory groups) much to the resentment of the bureaucratic machinery.

It took a full six months for Rumsfeld's team to come together: Douglas Feith as undersecretary for policy, and a policy shop of assistant secretaries, including J.D. Crouch and Peter Rodman. Not all appointees qualify for membership on the fabled pro-defense Blue Team, but Blue Teamers tell Insight that most of them do. "Don Rumsfeld," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) tells Insight, "has assembled a first-rate team. Both his intellect and his candor are underappreciated. I'm very thankful that he was willing to take this job a second time around."

But no sooner were these people in place after Labor Day than the al-Qaeda terrorists smashed a hijacked jetliner into the Pentagon. The attack, plus subsequent fire and water damage, wrecked more than one-quarter of the Pentagon's offices, forcing thousands of staff to relocate and further snarling operations.

In contrast to Congress, where all sides seemed to come together to support Bush, not all uniformed and civilian bureaucrats in the Pentagon fell into line when the president announced a long-term "war" against terrorism. Presidential supporters feared that with brand-new deputies Rumsfeld might not be in full control, that the Clintonized bureaucracy and uniformed services had become a force unto themselves. Some saw a lack of new thinking in the early stage of the war in Afghanistan. Just a few weeks after the U.S. attack on Taliban targets commenced on Oct. 7, some supporters of the Bush administration seemed to lose heart, and not without reason.

"As it unfolded over its first month, Operation Enduring Freedom resembled Bill Clinton's Operation Allied Force — the 1999 war against Yugoslavia — far more than it did George H.W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm," Andrew J. Bacevich, a 23-year Army veteran and West Point graduate who now directs the Center for International Relations at Boston University, said in late October. "Caution and half-heartedness — not boldness, not ferocity — have been this campaign's signature characteristics." Others with similar fears chose to remain quiet for the duration of the war. But not all.

"The war is not going well," complained conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer in the Oct. 30 Washington Post. "The Taliban have not yielded ground. Not a single important Taliban leader has been killed or captured or has defected. The war is not going well and it is time to say why. It has been fought with half-measures. It has been fought with an eye on the wishes of our 'coalition partners.' It has been fought to assuage the Arab 'street.' It has been fought to satisfy the diplomats rather than the generals."

Indeed, that is how it looked Oct. 30 as Rumsfeld fought to get things moving. It was as though the Joint Chiefs, all of whom received their stars under Clinton, were prepared only to fight the way they had been conditioned during the previous eight years, bombing empty buildings and abandoned training camps. Lobbing pinprick cruise missiles and precision-guided munitions terrorized the Taliban on the first night of attacks but gave them relatively little to fear afterward. Taliban defections stopped almost as soon as they had begun and morale soared.

President Bush's strongest supporters began asking quietly why he didn't unleash the ferocious B-52 Stratofortresses to carpet-bomb massed Taliban forces. Afghan Northern Alliance sources told Insight that while the United States delayed attacking Taliban front lines, the enemy sent its elite troops northward and the Northern Alliance fighters feared being wiped out; they were down to less than one week's worth of ammunition and medical supplies. The United States refused to intervene on their behalf for several crucial days.

Some blame the regular military for being reluctant to work with the Afghan fighters, though there appears to be little evidence of it. Others blame the State Department for heavy fussing about reluctance of coalition members to support the Northern Alliance.

After three weeks of pinpricks, morale in the United States and among its allies abroad began to crack. Taliban propaganda harped on real and concocted civilian deaths in the bombings. Establishment media reports from Afghanistan led viewers to wonder why the Americans were bombing mud huts and health clinics. News analyses worldwide were pronouncing that the United States had lost the propaganda war.

The tough and confident Rumsfeld guided the press and the public through times of doubt with his daily news briefings, putting his own personal prestige on the line by promising never intentionally to mislead the press. He commented to friends, "And there we were, less than a month and a few days since we launched the military campaign in Afghanistan; the fire in New York was not yet out. Smoke was still rising from the rubble, and the press already was asking why the war wasn't over yet." Publicly and privately, as he fought his way through the hundred trials, he maintained that the war was going according to schedule.

He knew, because it was his schedule, and he proved his point Halloween night. It was as if a drifting ship suddenly righted itself, caught an invisible wind and steered a fresh course. Wave after wave of B-52s rained ton after ton of bombs on the Taliban's front lines. Huge transport planes dropped 15,000-pound fuel-air explosives, the most powerful conventional bombs in the world, on the Taliban's vast networks of caves and tunnels. The ferocity of each day's American attack outdid the firepower of the day before. Rumsfeld was on deck.

The State Department hinted that the United States would ease up on the bombing in time for Islam's monthlong holy season of Ramadan in mid-November. Rumsfeld had a different idea. "Because it strikes at our very way of life, what we are as people, free people, we cannot stop our campaign for Ramadan. The terrorists threaten us still today, and we must root them out and defend the American people. You can be sure the terrorists won't stop," Rumsfeld told the Center for Security Policy on Nov. 6. "We will conduct a sustained campaign to take out al-Qaeda and their Taliban protectors. And then we'd best get after the rest of the terrorist networks."

A week later, the Taliban regime was running for its life.

Rumsfeld has returned old-fashioned military attitudes of yesteryear. Modern-day military leaders have eschewed words such as "kill" and "bomb" and "enemy," in favor of Clinton-era words such as "degrade." The defense secretary unabashedly embraces the old-fashioned terminology and, with it, a victorious way of thinking. A Nov. 13 news briefing by Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers shows the different approaches.

"Every day the targeting and effectiveness has improved, and that has clearly played a critical role in killing Taliban and al-Qaeda troops," Rumsfeld told reporters. Myers, in turn, spoke of "neutralizing Taliban capabilities," and of how U.S.-led efforts "have degraded some of al-Qaeda's fighting elements." Later in the briefing, Rumsfeld again emphasized that U.S. and Afghani Northern Alliance forces "have done a good deal to kill Taliban and al-Qaeda troops." Myers added, "We have degraded their command and control."

This isn't the first time Rumsfeld has ridden in to rescue the Pentagon. After the loss of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon in 1975, it was he who as White House chief of staff under President Gerald R. Ford suddenly became the nation's youngest secretary of Defense. "Nobody knew at the time that he was interested in defense," a former White House colleague recalls. "He not only staunched the bloodletting and demoralization, but slowed the general decay that was eating away at the defense and intelligence communities."

In addition to the military being under constant attack from the press and Capitol Hill, the intelligence community was spiraling toward destruction under a frontal attack led by then-senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). A new generation of brash post-Watergate congressmen, including such young left-wing firebrands as Ronald V. Dellums of California and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, took office the same year. They drove further wedges in the once-solid bipartisan national-security consensus and through the years rose to become political powerhouses of their own.

Dellums was in time chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (he subsequently quit Congress), and Dodd currently is chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and chief of a Foreign Relations Committee panel responsible for the Western Hemisphere and fighting narcoterrorism. It is Dodd who is blocking President Bush's choice, Otto Reich, to lead the State Department's Western Hemisphere division, from which battles against narcoterrorism could be fought effectively.

Sources close to Rumsfeld say he has received precious little support from the State Department, led by another strong personality, Secretary of State Colin Powell. Though an able implementer of policy, the retired four-star general historically has been cautious and risk-averse, according to insiders who have known him throughout his career. Politically popular, Powell is not of the temperament to rattle the cages when the president needs it.

"Bush, [Vice President Richard] Cheney and Rumsfeld make a great team, and Condi is a surprise," says another Pentagon official, referring to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "Rumsfeld and she are a good coalition."

J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001