The Bush administration officials who’ve been right about the things the president got wrong have two things in common: they’re small in number and they’ve been discouraged from sticking around.
With this in mind, these competent few deserve more recognition. Near the top of the list has to be Ret. Gen. Eric Shinseki, profiled the other day in the LA Times by Frank Gibney.
Shinseki had one key moment before the invasion of Iraq began last year, testifying before Senate committee about the task at hand. Asked how many troops would be needed for Iraq, Shinseki told lawmakers the truth: “several hundred thousand.” The truth, however, wasn’t part of the administration’s talking points and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. immediately denounced Shinseki for being “wildly off the mark.”
We now know, of course, that Shinseki was right and Bush’s Pentagon was wrong.
What’s worse, as Gibney explained, Shinseki made his perspective available to Rumsfeld, but he chose to ignore it.
What puzzled many of us who had listened to Shinseki was the contrast between his emphasis on careful military planning and how shortsighted the administration was in preparing for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Before the war, Shinseki’s Army planners were not once consulted by Rumsfeld’s office. The State Department’s planning proposal for postwar Iraq was similarly ignored by the administration.
It was a case of an outside group of civilian neoconservatives moving into the Pentagon and arrogantly taking over the military. Heedless of any advice to the contrary, Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” attack gained an apparent quick victory at the cost of postwar policy. Some 20 months after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq remains in pieces, with anti-American fervor strong and our military victory tarnished by a stubborn insurgency and the needless brutalities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
If this is what Rumsfeld’s idea of “transformation” has brought us, it’s a pity we didn’t try Shinseki’s.
It sure is.