IRAQ: Rumsfeld Under Heavy Fire at Home

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 2 2003 (IPS) - While the U.S. military continues to explode real bombs over Baghdad, a full-scale guerrilla war centred on President George W. Bush’s controversial Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld appears to have broken out in earnest back in Washington.

A coalition of retired senior military officers, moderate Republicans, and even some civilian hawks who have strongly supported Rumsfeld’s efforts to ”transform” the U.S. military, is increasingly taking aim at the Pentagon chief, whom they accuse of intimidating the uniformed military and needlessly alienating Washington’s European allies.

In a searing column in Wednesday’s ‘New York Times’, the former Commander of the U.S. central command in the Gulf region, retired Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar, even called on Congress to hold hearings on how the current military campaign in Iraq was conceived and developed and whether Rumsfeld had prevented senior officers from testifying to Congress about their concerns.

Except for a handful of liberals who have expressed alarm at the eagerness with which Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisers have taken Washington to war, Democrats have been reluctant to join the attacks lest they be accused of being unpatriotic.

But they voted unanimously in key congressional committees Tuesday for a supplemental 2004 appropriations bill that denied the Pentagon control over a 2.5-billion-dollar fund to provide relief and development assistance in Iraq. The committees instead earmarked the money for the State Department’s Agency of International Development (USAID).

In another slap, the House and Senate appropriations committees also deleted a requested 150 million dollars account that Rumsfeld had requested for assistance to unspecified ”indigenous forces” involved in the war on terrorism.

Few are suggesting that Rumsfeld is on the ropes just yet but it appears that he and his neo-conservative deputies, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, have never been so isolated, even as they insist that the war is going their way and that U.S. troops will soon be in Baghdad.

The attacks on Rumsfeld and his advisers are being waged on three fronts: the military conduct of the war; their plans for the post-war occupation; and their resistance to any meaningful role for the United Nations, an issue regarded as especially important to Washington’s traditional European allies.

The attack on the military front is being waged above all by retired senior military officers like Hoar and ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who led armoured units in the 1991 Gulf War, as well as with anonymous comments from officers in the field.

They have argued that by insisting on a fast dash by marines and infantry units from Kuwait to Baghdad, Pentagon officials have stretched forces far too thin, creating re-supply bottlenecks and exposing troops to guerrilla attacks from rear areas, which Pentagon planners had almost entirely discounted.

In particular, critics charge that Rumsfeld and his staff imposed a plan against the advice of some commanders designed to show off their ideas about a military ”transformation” – relying more on high-tech weaponry and speed than on the traditional U.S. doctrine of deploying overwhelming force at every point of the battlefield.

They argue that Pentagon assumptions about the Iraq response – essentially that Baghdad’s forces would crumble and surrender at the first sound of gunfire – have now been proven seriously mistaken, so that instead of being able to advance to Baghdad, coalition forces are now having to fight unexpected resistance in town after town.

As noted last week by Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of the main army division involved in the race to Baghdad, the enemy confronting coalition forces is very different ”from the one we’d war-gamed against”.

That line of attack from Rumsfeld’s critics is related directly to the Pentagon’s plans for occupying Iraq after the war. The assumption put out by Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration before the attack, that the vast majority of Iraqis would celebrate the arrival of U.S. troops as ”liberators”, has been widely discredited, leaving major questions about the nature and size of the occupation.

Particularly damaging to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz was the way they ridiculed Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s testimony before Congress prior to the war, that an occupation could require 200,000 U.S. troops or more. ”Wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz said at the time, an assertion that not only seemed designed to humiliate the Army’s senior officer, but that now, after two weeks of war, appears far too optimistic.

”The problem with the conduct of the war is that it is laying the seeds for a very ugly occupation,” noted ret. Amb. Chas Freeman, who warned that U.S. troops could face a situation not dissimilar to that experienced by Napoleon when he tried to occupy Spain.

”It is fairly incredible that the civilians (in the Pentagon) inhaled their own propaganda about the welcome that U.S. forces would receive from the Iraqis,” Freeman told IPS, adding, ”No one who knew anything about the region ever bought (the notion that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators), but no one who knew anything about the region was invited to take part in policy discussions.”

"In this case, there was a sort of cabalistic exclusion of the experts and an intent to misrepresent intelligence to sustain the policy.”

But the critics’ third line of attack may be the most telling, if only because it is being mounted in part by individuals who strongly supported the invasion.

In their view, Rumsfeld and his coterie have contributed most to the dangerous breach that has opened up between Washington and its European allies on the road to war.

They say the only way to undo the damage is to agree with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the rest of Europe that the United Nations must play a central role in any occupation – a position strongly opposed by Pentagon civilians, who have already designated a retired general to take over assisted by former CIA director, James Woolsey, another neo-conservative. Rumsfeld has insisted that the U.N. role be confined to relief and reconstruction and that its personnel report to the U.S. occupying forces.

But on this issue, Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even some neo-conservatives are refusing to go along, opposing any subordination of the world body to a U.S. viceroy. ”The last thing we need to do is look as though we are putting in a puppet government,” noted the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, who cited Rumsfeld by name as the man responsible for idea.

”Blair will break with us over this issue,” predicted Freeman. ”If we attempt to pursue a unilateral U.S. military occupation of Iraq, not only will we be compounding our political problems in Iraq and with the Arab world, but we also will be completely isolating ourselves.”