Rumsfeld gets a far better send-off than he deserved
Perhaps it should not be surprising that in a nation that gives trophies to kids just for showing up at Saturday morning soccer games and outlaws games of tag for fear of damaging young egos, the adults would soon be playing similar games.
But rewarding a lack of performance by children in the name of preserving their self-esteem is one thing. Putting on a military pageant and giving a 19-gun salute to the secretary of Defense who has mismanaged a war as no secretary of Defense has since Robert McNamara confuses pomp with parody.
It is ironic that the one member of the Bush administration who was right about Iraq -- Secretary of State Colin Powell -- was asked to resign and left office quietly last year. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld who was right about how long it would take to get to Baghdad, but wrong about almost everything regarding what it would take to protect the Iraqi people and create a functioning government after Saddam Hussein fell, was given full honors as he left office last week.
None other than Vice President Dick Cheney pronounced Rumsfeld the finest secretary of Defense the nation has ever had. We suppose that can be taken in the context of other Cheney pronouncements on Iraq, such as his prediction in March 2003 that Americans would be greeted as liberators and his assessment in June 2005 that the insurgency in Iraq was in its last throes. But we don't believe Cheney was speaking with any intentional irony.
Cheney may well think that the brightest thing a secretary of Defense has ever said is, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time, & quot; as Rumsfeld told a U.S. soldier who asked why troops were using scrap metal for improvised armor plating for vehicles in Iraq.
What should have been
The seemly thing for Rumsfeld to do would have been to quietly take his leave. It is almost as if the administration needed to mark Rumsfeld's last day with a grand gesture -- as if the ceremony would somehow prove that his tenure was a success.
The administration set the tone for this kind of phony recognition after three other architects of the Iraq war left office.
Two years ago, President Bush conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tommy Franks, the Army general who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; former CIA director George Tenet and L. Paul Bremer. It was Tenet who told Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a & quot;slam dunk & quot; -- an erroneous assessment with history-changing consequences. It was L. Paul Bremer who replaced Jay Garner as overseer of the reconstruction of Iraq. Bremer discarded Garner's careful plan, disbanded the Iraqi military and told an Iraqi advisory group Garner had assembled that "we're in charge," inspiring them to walk out.
Giving Tenet and Bremer Medals of Freedom rewarded arrogance and incompetence and ignored the havoc left in their wake. Since Rumsfeld had already received a Medal of Freedom for his service to President Gerald Ford, he got a hero's send- off from the Pentagon. Those left behind will spend the next decade digging out from his mess.