Rumsfeld Must Act

[thedrifter]

05-14-2004

Rumsfeld Must Act



By Raymond Perry



At the height of an earlier political feeding frenzy concerning Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld?s handling of the Iraq occupation, I examined his leadership style (?Rumsfeld Must Change to Still Succeed,? DefenseWatch, Oct. 14, 2003) and concluded that to succeed the secretary had to stop operating as a business executive and start acting as a statesman.



As I wrote back then, there was an important reason why this had to occur:



?A businessman is capable of controlling much about his firm, but a statesman recognizes that he cannot control everything himself. Thus, his focus needs to be on putting in place an organization that will enable his subordinates to control those many things with the result that he does hold a firm grip on the whole organization.?



Seven months later as Rumsfeld scrambles to survive amidst the scandal over Iraqi prisoner abuse, it is clear that Rumsfeld has failed to make that transition to statesman.



Rumsfeld?s surprise trip to Iraq this week is an indicator that he takes seriously his duties, but I remain skeptical the he gets it. This is a leadership failure of the first order. Rumsfeld must clearly identify the causes, set forth the fix, and carry it, personally and quickly, to the American people.



In his testimony to Congress last week, Rumsfeld stated that he could still be effective as secretary of defense. But that is not enough. His statement that ?the system works? because of the actions taken by the military justice system on learning of the abuse of prisoners is also not enough.



To say that the system works because investigations are underway is akin to saying that the broom and dustpan worked well in cleaning up broken china. The issue is that the system broke down when military leadership allowed the abuse to begin and propagate.



Columnist David Brode wrote in The Washington Post on May 9 that Rumsfeld faces a ?McNamara Moment,? recounting how then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was blinded by a ?technocratic-bureaucratic body-count mindset? when he was running the Department of Defense during the Vietnam war.



A similar situation allowed the U.S. Air Force Academy to fall into a similar trap last year with its sexual harassment scandal involving the cadet wing. As I noted in an article on the scandal (?A Failure of Our Ethos,? DefenseWatch, July 2003), the inaction of senior Air Force leaders allowed the evidence of cadet criminal conduct to keep piling up until many of those senior officers had to be removed.



In a startling parallel to the Academy scandal, the point about the MP guards at Abu Ghraib prison is not whether any of them had the guts to stand up to the intelligence cadre ? guts was simply not the issue ? but rather that these soldiers were neither able to recognize that they had gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior nor capable of stopping the cascade of events.



In terms of the impact of the prisoner scandal on the occupation of Iraq, I returned to earlier research on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in March 1968 (?Just Don?t Call It Another ?Tet Offensive?,? DefenseWatch, Apr. 21, 2004) ? a military victory for the United States and South Vietnam that became a strategic defeat. There were two keys to it becoming a strategic victory for the North Vietnamese: The American press did not understand the war and, more significantly to the present situation, the American people lost faith in the ability of their military leaders to understand the war in Vietnam and to be able to win it.



The winning of ?Hearts & Minds? (?The ?Hearts and Minds? Game,? DefenseWatch, Jan. 9, 2004), has been the byword of our efforts to work with the Iraqi population. Surely the American people are now wondering if this approach is a sham. If so a critical question is whether or not the American people are prepared to continue to stomach the war and the deaths of their children in uniform.



Rumsfeld must stand tall as a statesman. This is a defining event and he must take charge. It is clear from the Investigation by the U.S. Army into the 800th Military Police Brigade that the leadership failed from the very top.



What is less clear is the responsibility of officers senior to the 800th Military Police Brigade. The vast number of issues revealed by the investigation show that external organizations were just not paying attention to business. Inevitably, there will be strong efforts to satisfy the hue and cry by going after a number of junior soldiers to quiet things down.



There is a ?gentlemanliness? among general officers that says one does not poke into another?s affairs. This typically has the effect of applying criminal charges only to the lowest possible ranking soldier. Rumsfeld must get far beyond this in cleaning up this mess.



These officers were captains of their ships: brigade commander Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, 820th MP Battalion commander Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade commander Col. Thomas Pappas. Their ships went hard aground, sustaining enormous damage for the nation and our cause.



It is clear from the reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross that due notice had been delivered to senior officers within the U. S. Central Command well before the revelations brought by a soldier in January that triggered the Army probe. The first of these was in March of 2003, ten months before attention was truly given to the reports of abusive handling of prisoners.



Rumsfeld must run to ground this failure by senior officers to act on a clear warning by an organization such as the Red Cross. These officers were part of the staff of the Commander, U.S. Central Command.



As a statesman, Rumsfeld must also question the heart of the commissioned officer corps of the U.S. military as a whole. The similarity between the prison scandal and the travails of the U. S. Air Force Academy is clear: Organizations do this if they do not have a core of ethics on which to rely when behavior spins out of control. The higher up the chain of command, the more powerful the incentive to justify the actions of lower levels, and the diminished chances that the institution will learn from its mistakes.



Lt. Raymond Perry USN (Ret.) is a DefenseWatch Contributing Editor. He can be reached at cos1stlt@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.


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Ellie