Donald Rumsfeld’s disdained legacy
Donald Rumsfeld’s disdained legacy
His warning against American retreat and weakness is being dangerously ignored
With ironic timing, the death of Donald Rumsfeld this week has occurred when American foreign policy is lurching in precisely the opposite direction to everything he stood for.
His passing has provoked a renewed chorus of bilious disdain from those for whom he was a lightning rod for the failures of the 2003 Iraq war in which, as America’s defence secretary, he played a key role.
He certainly made mistakes over that war, having grossly underestimated the strength of the subsequent insurgency.
But the real damage has been inflicted not by Rumsfeld but by his critics. For the war has been grossly mischaracterised, resulting in the world becoming a far more dangerous place.
The real reason that America went to war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein was that, after 9/11, the calibration of risk suddenly changed.
No longer could America muddle along against its Islamist enemies. And over Saddam Hussein, until then America’s most active such enemy, US policy had been adrift.
In his memoir Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld pointed out that between January 2000 and September 2002, Iraq attacked the US military more than 2,000 times.
In the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld argued that America should develop a policy towards Iraq well ahead of any unforeseen events that might overtake the US, which could suddenly find Saddam posing an even greater threat.
Such an event happened on 9/11. Although intelligence didn’t suggest Saddam’s involvement in those attacks, Iraq was a principal state supporter of terrorism. The CIA said senior Iraqis had credible links with al Qaeda, which was seeking Iraqi contacts to help it acquire capabilities for weapons of mass destruction. And previous attempts to keep Saddam in check had all failed.
All these sound reasons for destroying his regime were ignored by Rumsfeld’s critics. The great cry went up instead that the west was taken to war on a lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
This false and malevolent characterisation of the motive for the war, coupled with the grievous mishandling of the aftermath, produced the disastrous consequences of an anti-war movement that shaped a generation and the wider belief that the west should never again get involved in the Islamic world.
This reinforced an attitude already prevalent since the Vietnam war, a mindset which itself was to help contribute both to the crisis over Saddam Hussein and over the rise of al Qaeda and the Islamic jihad against the west.
For scarred by its defeat in Vietnam, America became demoralised and deeply reluctant to commit blood and treasure to foreign wars.
In Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld wrote that the US retreat from Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps and French army barracks in Beirut, as well as subsequent acts of terror, showed that America was still a prisoner of its Vietnam experience.
It was important, he wrote, that by contrast America should never cower in the face of terror or abandon its friends; the only way to deal with terrorists was to take the fight to them.
Over and over again, however, the enemies of the west have instead smelled American weakness. And this has galvanised them.
When the Marines fled after the 1983 bombing, wrote Rumsfeld, a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden observed that this demonstrated “the decline of American power and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars”.
It was then that bin Laden said he first conceived his attack on the World Trade Centre. In September 1984, after US forces had withdrawn from Lebanon, the US embassy annex was nearly destroyed by a bomb, the third major attack on Americans in Lebanon in three years.
Saddam Hussein also believed that America wouldn’t have the stomach to fight him to the finish.
What Rumsfeld’s foes overlook is that Saddam had long been viewed as such a danger to America that a law mandating regime change in Iraq had been introduced by President Bill Clinton in 1998.
But after the debacle in Iraq following Saddam’s removal, subsequent presidents wanted America to retreat from active involvement in the region. This merely resulted in one perverse effect after another.
Thus, President Barack Obama laid down red lines against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria which Obama then proceeded to ignore, with unspeakable atrocities occurring in Syria as a result — and the US being viewed as a paper tiger.
One reason why Obama wanted to bring Iran in from the cold through the 2015 nuclear deal was to enable the US to get out of the Middle East. Absurdly, he thought he could bring this about through evening up the balance of power in the region between Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, thus achieving a geopolitical equilibrium. But all he achieved instead was the empowerment of Iran, the most lethal rogue state in the world.
During the US election campaign, President Joe Biden affirmed his intention to “end the forever wars” to which the US had been party.
But the result has been merely that America now finds itself gravely weakened when it is inevitably sucked into conflicts that are too dangerous to ignore, but where its demonstrable absence of resolve further emboldens the enemies of the west.
In Iraq and Syria, the Biden administration forlornly announced early this week that it had carried out further airstrikes on Iran-backed militia groups “to disrupt and deter” the increasingly sophisticated drone strikes on US positions.
Regarding Iran, the Biden administration’s palpable eagerness to reinstitute the 2015 nuclear deal has merely provoked ever-increasing Iranian intransigence and repeated attacks on American interests. The US response has been feeble to non-existent, thus provoking yet more Iranian aggression.
America’s unconditional renewal of funds and diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian Authority, in apparent indifference to its continued incitement against Israel and support for terrorism, has caused the Palestinians and their Iranian backers to conclude that they can continue to launch rockets and firebombs against Israel with zero risk that America will hold them to account.
In Afghanistan, where President Donald Trump demonstrated his own isolationist mindset by unwisely announcing a withdrawal of American troops, Biden announced he was accelerating this timetable.
As a result, the Taliban has been making rapid advances by unleashing violent attacks upon the Afghan army. Now the Biden administration is panicking.
Officials say that the US could complete its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan within days. However, as many as 1,000 troops may still remain after the formal withdrawal to help protect the US embassy in Kabul and the city’s airport.
And military officials are actively discussing using US warplanes or armed drones to intervene in a potential crisis such as the fall of Kabul, the Afghan capital, or a siege that puts American and allied embassies and citizens there at risk.
Donald Rumsfeld understood that the biggest “known known” in the defence of America and its allies is the need to display unwavering resolve against the enemy. And if that means keeping troops on the ground for the long haul in Afghanistan to prevent the return of al Qaeda, so be it.
In his valedictory speech when he left the Pentagon, he said: “A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out our missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power. It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat. But the enemy thinks differently.”
Indeed it does. And the Biden administration is learning this — or failing to learn it — the hard way.
Recent posts
Premium subscribers can read my most recent exclusive post, on how the Palestinians’ incipient police state doesn’t fit the western narrative, if you click here.
And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, on the family of elephants in the room, by clicking here.
One more thing…
This is how my website works.
It has two subscription levels: my free service and the premium service.
Anyone can sign up to the free service on this website. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” at the foot of each email.
Everyone on the free list will receive the full text of pieces I write for outlets such as the Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as other posts and links to my broadcasting work.
But why not subscribe to my premium service? For that you’ll also receive pieces that I write specially for my premium subscribers. Those articles will not be published elsewhere. They’ll arrive in your inbox as soon as I have written them.
There is a monthly fee of $6.99 for the premium service, or $70 for an annual subscription. Although the fee is charged in US dollars, you can sign up with any credit card. Just click on the “subscribe now” button below to see the available options for subscribing either to the premium or the free service.
A note on subscriptions
If you purchase a subscription to my site, you will be authorising a payment to my company Dirah Associates. In the past, that is the name that may have appeared on your credit card statement. In future, though, the charge should appear instead as Melanie Phillips.
And thank you for following my work.