I get to hear some pretty good rants, especially when my brother is in town and he and my husband get together. Take them to a bar and give them a couple of beers and a pool table, and sit back and listen. Hoo boy. Did they tear Rummy a new asshole last weekend.Quick - how many previous SecDefs' can you recall? I can come up with a couple that I recall because they were horrible - Robert MacNamara and Louis Johnson - and two from the Clinton administration - Les Aspen, because he passed away soon after leaving the post, and William Cohen because Bill Clinton tapped a Republican. There was another one, but without using Google, his name escapes me. The success of a Secretary of Defense is measured by how quickly he passes from memory and into the footnotes of history.
But who among us can honestly say that we will ever forget Rumsfeld? He has long since surpassed MacNamara in every area - he is more craven and more vitriolic and a bigger technocrat than MacNamara ever though about being. He has less thought for our troops and the mission he has asked them to complete.
I said it. Rummy is the worst SecDef in our history. Now I will back it up.
Rumsfeld has removed every bit of counterbalance in his way. Remember General Shinseki? The man who saw this Iraq fiasco coming, and was fired for saying so? The Pentagon climate is fetid, the atmosphere of command has been poisoned. He is great at bureaucratic knife-fights, but he is lousy at running Defense. His management style is authoritarian and rigid and those who come into his office to tell him news he does not want to hear learn quickly not to make that mistake again. Accountability is non-existant. Watch a press conference. He will answer the easy questions, usually with an insult or two. But ask him a tough question, and he shoves a uniformed officer in front of the mike and steps aside for a moment.
The Secretary of Defense is the civilian authority over evey man and woman in uniform, from the lowliest grunt to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the SecDef answers only to the president.
Leadership is supposed to mean that the leader has penultimate authority and uses it judiciously; for everything, good and bad, rests on the shoulders of the leader, the man in charge. This man in charge has some strange notions about how the military works. Instead of sober analysis, he decides on a course that will be taken and then those beneath him are charged with first justifying his decision, then executing it. Instead of listing to those professional soldiers at his avail, he surrounds himself with yes-men who know better yet disgrace their uniforms by backing his plays.
He wants to run the Department of Defense like a business. Except it is not a business. It is a branch of government. Rumsfeld stubbornly clings to failed hypotheses of war-fighting, even in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary. He cuts the brass out of the decision-making loop, and totally disses them. He doesn't just undermine, he accuses, abuses and belittles the professional military advice, but relentlessly keeps them out of the decision-making process.
Everything that goes right is due to him, everything that goes wrong is the fault of the troops or the officers who command them. That's no way to run a meritocracy, and that is exactly what the military is.
Rumsfeld is so keen on his new ideas to *make everything better* that he has frivolously ignored the tried-and-true, to our nations peril, to our indicidual peril and to the peril of the troops in uniform. This tunnelvision has caused him to lash out At any and all who dare offer another point of view.
Rumsfeld, like his boss, flatly refuses to accept this reality that they have created. And they do not intend to. Bush has told us that this will be the responsibility of the next administration and the next SecDef to find a way out of this clusterfuck.
Morality you say? What is that all about? Morality is an outdated concept and it has no place in a Rumsfeld DoD. All of these offenses add up to a shredding of the Honor Code, and that is the most important principle of a free country. The Honor Code is why a free country can remain free, without falling under the tyranny of it's military. The Honor Code is the most important construct of all, and should it fail, it could set off a chain of events that might easily destroy our nation.
For these reasons, and oh so many more, Rumsfeld is the worst Secretary of Defense this nation has ever seen.
No one will ever forget the name Donald Rumsfeld.
