When it comes to Donald Rumsfeld and Iraq, the problem isn’t necessarily that he had an ineffective plan for the post-combat period, it’s that he intentionally didn’t want any plan at all.
Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said.
Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid told the Newport News Daily Press in an interview published yesterday that Rumsfeld had said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a postwar plan.
Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld “told us to get ready for Iraq.”
“The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”
We’ve heard reports like this before, but when a Central Command colonel goes public like this, with these details, it’s still surprising. Indeed, Scheid went on to explain that Army officials wanted to craft a plan to cover post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, but “I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that.”
The implications of these comments are important, for at least two reasons.
First, Rumsfeld’s failure to even consider a rebuilding plan is the surest sign yet that his tenure at the Pentagon is beyond defense. During a Senate debate the other day about a no-confidence vote Dems wanted, a series of Republican lawmakers said Rumsfeld has done a fine job. I’d love to hear those same senators respond to Brig. Gen. Scheid’s perspective.
And second, as Kevin Drum noted, it further contradicts the president’s so-called “freedom agenda.”
And this also means that all of Bush’s talk about democracy was nothing but hot air. If you’re serious about planting democracy after a war, you don’t plan to simply topple a government and then leave.
So: the lack of postwar planning wasn’t merely the result of incompetence. It was deliberate policy. There was never any intention of rebuilding Iraq and there was never any intention of wasting time on democracy promotion. That was merely a post hoc explanation after we failed to find the promised WMD.
It’s really as simple as that.