Subject: After Rumsfeld, A new Dawn? Pt 1
Time: 1:32:54 PM EDT
Author: asixpilot
After Rumsfeld, a New Dawn?
By Mark Perry
In the American movie Cool Hand Luke - a cult classic in the US - a
drunken Paul Newman faces his jailer. "What we have here," intones the
captain of Road Prison 36, "is a failure to communicate." The movie has
provided fodder for a gaggle of bloggers, who now refer to US Lieutenant
General Douglas E Lute, President George W Bush's new "war czar", as "Cool
Hand Lute".
Lute recently made the rounds of official Washington, telling everyone that
aside from the advisability of invading Iraq in the first place (something
with which, in private, he had real problems), the US national security
establishment's failure to coordinate policy, its failure to communicate, is
leading the nation into a foreign-policy debacle.
Lute's appointment in May as "war czar" is a talisman of this disaster.
Lute's job, as he sees it, is to help reverse this potential disaster and
shape a national security establishment that actually works. His colleagues
say he's terribly worried that he's fated to fail.
Lute's most powerful ally in his lone battle to rebuild what he sees as the
shattered American national security establishment is Robert Gates, the
unassuming, seemingly soft-as-a-pillow new secretary of defense.
Gates is Donald Rumsfeld-in-reverse. Gates is a man who has spent a career
being underestimated. "Gates is soft-spoken, courteous, a very good
listener, workmanlike, treats people well, has a good sense of humor - and
is completely and absolutely ruthless," a colleague who has worked with him
for three decades notes.
"It took a lot for Bob Gates to take that job," former US Marine Corps
commandant Joe Hoar says. "Let me be blunt. He was president of Texas A&M
[University] and he had the job for life. Why would he take on a major
headache like the Pentagon? He told Bush he wanted the right to run the
Pentagon his way and he didn't want what he said vetted by the White House.
And Bush was in trouble and he knew it. So he agreed. And Gates might look
like a soft guy, but he's a realist and he's a patriot and he knows
Washington and he knows what he wants. And he got it."
What Gates got when he took over last December was the right to do things
his way. "When Gates showed up at the Pentagon, he was just stunned," a
senior civilian official at the Defense Department says. "No one knew what
was going on. There were no plans. Nothing worked. The policy establishment
was broken."
In his first meeting with the major heads of departments, Gates said they
would not be replaced ("We don't have time for that," he said) and announced
that he would spend the next weeks traveling. In his first two months as
Defense Secretary, Gates might have spent four days at the Pentagon, if
that. "We just didn't see him," an official said. "He was elsewhere."
Gates was in the Middle East - talking with coalition commander General
George Casey and CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid. Gates talked to the
troops, held press conferences, smiled for the cameras, shook hands
- and decided that America was losing.
"I think it's pretty clear that Bob spent long nights, alone, thinking about
all of this by himself," a friend says, "and he just decided to throw out
all of this neo-con stuff and all this bunk about democracy and Islam and
the clash of civilizations and he decided the country needed to get back to
the basics. What is the mission? Are we accomplishing it? What do we need to
get it done? Can we do it? How long will it take? How much will it cost? And
he just decided that everything else is just so much talk. And really it was
a breath of fresh air.
"He just stopped people talking about that stuff. So he went in and started
to clean it up. And he was quiet about it, but he made it clear:
there are rules, and if you don't obey the rules you're out. And there's a
chain of command, and if you don't follow it, you're gone. There's a chain
of command at the Department of Defense, and there's only one man at the top
of it. And he's [Gates] at the top of it. Maybe at the end he won't fix all
of it, but he's sure going to try."
Starting at the top
After just six weeks on the job, and after hours of discussions with Casey,
Abizaid and their key combat subordinates, Gates was convinced that the US
senior military leadership in Iraq and in the Middle East needed to be
replaced. Casey and Abizaid were nearly exhausted from years of fighting
both the Iraqi insurgency and Rumsfeld. Gates feared both had lost their
edge as well as the confidence of their subordinate commanders.
In one sense, Gates was lucky. With Casey due to rotate back to Washington
as the new army chief of staff and Abizaid up for retirement, the change in
command could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary. The change would be
swift and painless. Neither Casey nor Abizaid need be embarrassed. Both men
would be given parades, medals and handshakes.
"There would be no blood on the floor," a Pentagon civilian official said of
the command change. But no one was fooled: Casey and Abizaid had been
sidelined.
"Gates was particularly disturbed with Abizaid," a Pentagon official says.
"His [Central Command Regional military] staff had ballooned, it was way out
of wack. There were 3,800 officers in the region, sitting at their computers
in their little cubby holes. That was more than [president Dwight D
Eisenhower had in Europe in World War II. Gates came back to Washington and
said, 'What the hell are these people doing? Why aren't they in the front
lines'?"
Abizaid had always had problems with staffing. One of his jobs at the
Pentagon prior to his Gulf deployment was to organize former deputy defense
secretary Paul Wolfowitz's staff - "and he actually made it worse, if you
can believe that".
The rap on Casey was different: "He was simply indecisive, like [former
president] Jimmy Carter. His commanders would come to him with options and
he would look around the table and say, 'Well gentlemen, what should we do?'
Damn, why was he asking them? He was the one who was supposed to be in
charge," the Pentagon official says.
Gates was not the only one who had decided there needed to be a command
shift in Iraq. Retired Army four-star General Jack Keane, arguably the most
influential military thinker in Washington - and author of the Bush
administration's "surge" strategy from his aerie position at the American
Enterprise Institute - had come to the same conclusion as Gates.
Keane has direct access to Bush and had been telling the president he needed
a new Iraq commander. In December, at the same time that Gates was talking
to Casey and Abizaid in Iraq, Keane told Bush that Casey should be brought
back to Washington and replaced by General David Petraeus, the former
commander of the 101st Airborne and the author of "Field Manuel 3-24", the
bible of US counter-insurgency doctrine.
Keane was a Petraeus partisan, having served with the tough-as-nails
Petraeus when Keane was a brigadier general in the early 1990s. Bush
hesitated over appointing Petraeus because he knew that he had a habit of
speaking his mind. But Bush finally conceded and, after consulting with
Gates, he agreed to Petraeus' appointment.
By the time Petraeus had been appointed as the new coalition command in
Baghdad, Abizaid had been sent into retirement and replaced by Admiral
William Fallon, a 40-year navy veteran. Fallon's appointment as CENTCOM
commander was a surprise, as the billet is usually reserved for the army.
But Gates was impressed by Fallon's credentials. "He's probably got more
service and more experience than any man in the navy," Joe Hoar says, "and
he's more respected. There's no more refined bullshit sniffer than Fallon."
Gates had come to the same conclusion, and was also intent to make CENTCOM a
workable regional command headed by someone who would not interfere with
Petraeus. Gates was impressed with Fallon's background as a diplomat in the
Pacific. When a Japanese fishing ship was accidentally sunk by an American
navy vessel off Hawaii, Fallon volunteered to offer apologies to the
Japanese families of the dead.
But Fallon's appointment to head CENTCOM immediately sparked fears that he
would prepare the navy for an attack on Iran, speculation fueled by the
deployment of two carrier groups to the Persian Gulf. Fallon did little to
dispel this notion, and when asked by senators whether he believed Iran
would acquire nuclear weapons he answer decisively:
"Absolutely," he said. "Probably some time in the next decade."
Fallon has further dispelled fears that he favors such an attack when rumors
circulated that he recently received a call from the White House that he
consider providing air cover to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. He was
aghast: "With what," he reportedly said. Fallon's influence at CENTCOM is
also much in evidence. "Historically that place has been run by infantry and
armor," Hoar says. "Well, he's turned that place upside down." Among the
changes: upwards of 2,000 staffers have been sent to other assignments.
The fight over the czar
While Gates was running around the Middle East, Republican gadfly and
presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich was circulating one of his inimitable
18-point leadership papers inside the White House. In a memo first floated
there in January, Gingrich wrote to Bush that what was needed to right the
listing Iraq military ship was a "war czar" - a supreme military commander
who could coordinate war planning.
The appointment of a "war czar" was point number three on Gingrich's list of
recommendations. "The slowness and ineffectiveness of the American
bureaucracy is a major hindrance to our winning, and they've got to cut
through it," Gingrich later explained to Washington Post reporters Peter
Baker and Thomas Ricks.
Gingrich, who styles himself an expert on wartime leadership (he once told
his staff to write an extensive research paper on the leadership qualities
of one of his heroes - Napoleon, whom he emulates), believed that an eminent
four-star retired officer would be perfect for the job:
reporting only to Bush and able to stand above the Joint Chiefs.
Gingrich's idea was classically conservative. Like George Will, John McCain
and others of their ilk ("conservatives without the neo," as Will has called
them), Gingrich had only hesitantly backed the Iraq War, and then stood
aghast as it was catastrophically managed. While they criticized the younger
Bush's father for going soft on the conservative social agenda, they much
preferred his management style - and competence.
They had grown to mistrust the neo-conservatives around Vice President Dick
Cheney and increasingly viewed them as mindless ideologues. This slipped by
the younger Bush, who was as attracted to the idea of a war czar as a
mindless puppy to a new squeaky-toy. Bush passed the memo on to his national
security staff, where it gained the approval of National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley, who was intent to gain some relief from the daily battering
he was taking over Iraq.
But Gates and the US military were less than enthusiastic about the proposal
and when Gingrich's idea became public the chiefs registered their
disapproval in public. The disapproval came in the form of public
condemnations of the idea from retired officers close to Pace and new Army
Chief of Staff Casey.
"Standing up a war czar is just throwing in another layer of bureaucracy,"
retired Major General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division
in Iraq, told reporters on April 12. "Excuse me - we have a chain of command
already and it's time for our leaders to step up and take charge." Retired
Lieutenant General Robert Gard, who served as secretary of defense Robert
McNamara's military assistant during the Vietnam War, was even more
outspoken. "I thought the president was the commander-in-chief. Isn't he
supposed to be his own war czar?"
Gates was asking the same question. But the more that Gates thought about
the idea, the more it appealed to him - that is, if he could convince the
White House to appoint a serving officer to the position.
Pace was coming to the same conclusion. In mid-April, the Joint Chiefs of
Staff chairman set to work, accessing his well-worn network of retired
officers to recommend to Bush that he rely on the chiefs to recommend a
current serving Joint Chiefs of Staff officer as his primary military
advisor on the war.
While it is not certain exactly what influence Pace and the other officers
of the American high command had on the retired community, we now know that
when Hadley offered the "war czar" position to five retired officers, they
not only turned him down, they did so publicly - and sometimes
embarrassingly.
The betting in Washington is that that kind of denunciation is simply too
unanimous to be an accident. The first to be offered the job was Jack Keane,
the former vice chief of staff and the author of the "surge"
plan who, considering his access to Bush, might have been expected to take
the job. He politely declined. The second was retired US Marine Corps
General Jack Sheehan, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander
who is a well-known critic of the administration's Middle East policies.
Sheehan was shocked when he received Hadley's telephone call.
"He didn't say 'no', he said 'hell no'," one retired Marine colonel says.
Sheehan was even more outspoken with the press. When asked why he turned
down the position, he grunted his response: "The very fundamental issue is,
they don't know where the hell they're going," he responded. "So rather than
go over there [to the White House], develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I
said, 'No, thanks'."
The third retired commander that Hadley called was former air force General
Joseph Ralston, who also declined. Ralston was surprised by the offer.
Ralston had served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman from 1996 to
2000 and was expected to succeed John Shalikashvili when Shalikashvili
retired. But the talented Ralston withdrew from consideration when it was
discovered he had had an extramarital affair with a Central Intelligence
Agency officer while separated from his wife.
When official Washington learned that Hadley had offered Ralston the job
they wondered whether Hadley had remembered the incident - did he think that
the Senate, which would have to confirm the appointment, had forgotten it?
Did they think Ralston wouldn't be asked.
Two other commanders also turned down Hadley's offer: air force General John
P Jumper (who had retired as air force chief of staff in 2005) and marine
General Charles Wilhelm as blunt as Sheehan, with more combat ribbons.
Wilhelm had apparently seen too many failed operations (in Vietnam, Somalia
and Haiti to name just three) to undertaken another.
By the third week of April, it was clear that the White House would have to
turn to Gates, Pace and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their recommendation.
Pressure was building inside the National Security Council for a solution:
Hadley was under increasing strain, and two key assistants - J D Crouch, the
deputy national security advisor and one of the most outspoken proponents of
the "surge" strategy inside the White House and Meghan O'Sullivan, the
administration's top national security council official for Iraq and
Afghanistan - had announced they would be leaving.
More critically, at a time when Bush was being pressed to defend the
"surge", new CENTCOM chief Fallon was expressing troubling public doubts
that the war in Iraq could actually worsen - despite the "surge". His views
were buttressed by an entire host of retired military officers, who said
that the solution to the Iraq crisis was more political than military.
Even more surprising, those views were echoed by Gates and Petraeus. At the
same time that Bush and Hadley were searching vainly for a war czar, Gates
was on yet another trip through the Middle East, and blithely punched holes
in White House claims that the "surge" would provide a military solution to
the Iraq debacle. The US commitment to Iraq was "not open-ended", Gates said
on April 18 in Baghdad.
The next day, Petraeus echoed the sentiment, saying the security situation
in Baghdad "has lost a little traction". To Hadley and the rest of the
nationalsecurity staff the message from Gates seemed hardly
subtle: there would be a "war czar" all right - but he would come from the
military.
Abandon ship
Gates returned to Washington from his mid-April trip to the Middle East more
convinced than ever that the administration's new "war czar" needed to be a
currently serving high ranking commander. His first days at the Pentagon did
nothing to dissuade him from that view.
The national security establishment was more chaotic than ever - with few
hands-on officials actually running the Iraq War. While Hadley's most
outspoken critics have had a field day excoriating the former lawyer and
assistant secretary of defense (he served under Cheney at the Pentagon
during the first Bush administration), as one of the nation's weakest
National Security Council chiefs, Gates knew that Hadley was working 18 hour
days.
The reason for the additional pressure came from the resignation of Hadley's
assistant, Crouch, Bush's deputy national security adviser and a key
architect of the administration's "surge" strategy, who announced his
resignation May 4. Not many senior military officers were unhappy to see
Crouch go. The former Missouri deputy sheriff was known for his impractical
military suggestions, derived in part from his time on the board of advisors
of Frank Gaffney's ideologically driven Center for Security Policy.
Hadley's headaches had also worsened when earlier O'Sullivan said she would
be leaving the White House. That was bad news for Hadley, though officials
at the Pentagon shrugged. One Pentagon official says that O'Sullivan's loss
was hardly felt. As he relates: just prior to Iraqi politician Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim's visit to Washington in March, O'Sullivan was told the Shi'ite
leader had strong ties to Iran. "She was shocked," this official remembered.
"She just didn't have a clue."
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