February22, 2007:
U.S. senator John McCain recently claimed that former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld mismanaged the war in Iraq, and was one of the worst
performances as Secretary of Defense ever. McCain's comments, however do not
really reflect the reality of the situation. While Iraq has not been without
its bumps in the road, there have been successes in that country. At the same
time, Rumsfeld may have made mistakes, but he also had a number of
accomplishments to his credit.
In
Iraq, the accomplishments are many. At the start of the war, Iraq was a
dictatorship run by Saddam Hussein. Saddam's regime was also documented to have
had a relationship with al-Qaeda (to the point of inviting personal envoys from
Osama bin Laden to Baghdad for talks). Since the liberation of Iraq, it has
become an emerging democracy. Also, the United States has taken out some senior
terrorists, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. These accomplishments have achieved
with the loweest casualty rate in American military history.
Iraq
is not the first campaign in history to have things go wrong. During the
American Civil War, Union generals in the East were known for varying degrees
of inaction or incompetence, until George Meade took over in 1863. Even then,
the Union did not see success until Ulysses S. Grant was placed in command in
1864. In 1942, the American campaign at Guadalcanal got off to a spectacularly
ugly start with the battle of Savo Island, in which over a thousand Allied
sailors were killed. In 1943, the North African battle of Kasserine Pass
revealed defects in American training. That same year, the invasion of Tarawa
went horribly wrong due to poorly-planned pre-invasion air and naval bombardments.
The following year, 1944, not only featured the Battle of the Bulge (a major
intelligence failure), but also the successful decoying of American naval units
during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Both Korea and Vietnam also featured instances
where things did not go as planned. Iraq is just the latest war where this has
happened. The same will happen in future wars.
Rumsfeld's
other accomplishments as Secretary of Defense also put the lie to McCain's
comments. During his tenure as Secretary of Defense, the United States took
three state sponsors of terror off the board. Under Rumsfeld's five-plus years
of running the war on terror, the United States also took out or captured a
number of high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders, including Abu Ali al-Harithi, Abu
Zubaydah, Mohammed Atef, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Rumsfeld was also able to
modernize the United States military while fighting that war, taking the Army
is also going from 48 deployable brigades to 70 through a massive
reorganization. In a very real sense, he killed the Crusader self-propelled
artillery system in 2002 and the Comanche scout/attack helicopter in 2004.
Much
of the criticism aimed at Rumsfeld is done with the benefit of hindsight, when
consequences of decisions are clear. Perhaps in John McCain's world, Rumsfeld's
tenure has been a complete failure. However, in the real world, Donald
Rumsfeld's second tenure as Secretary of Defense featured very real
accomplishments that put the lie to McCain's cheap shot. In a very real sense,
Rumsfeld's mistakes were the result of being willing to try to do something
about terrorism and states that sponsored it. – Harold C. Hutchison
([email protected])