Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
November 10, 2006; Page A16
When my junior-officer class graduated from Clandestine Service training, Robert Gates was there to hand us our diplomas. I and the other newly minted case officers were underwhelmed. We'd wanted Bill Casey, the director of central intelligence, one of the brotherhood of spies from World War II -- not his deputy -- to welcome us into the CIA. Inside the Directorate of Operations, Mr. Gates was viewed as an intelligent, adept bureaucratic operator, a finger-in-the-air, greasy-pole climbing, charisma-free, unlovable fellow whom you'd not want to watch your back.
This view was unfair and predicated largely on one undeniable fact: Mr. Gates didn't think the world of case officers and the Clandestine Service's contribution to America's national security. Mr. Gates, who'd come from the analytical wing at Langley -- the Directorate of Intelligence -- and had risen as a Washington insider, knew that the DI, not the DO, was the dominant force in producing the intelligence that the capital's VIPs read.
And Mr. Gates always gave the impression -- it is the single most commendable aspect of his autobiography, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War" -- that CIA analysis, espionage and covert action all had their limits in how well they could inform and guide policy makers. In the bubble world of Langley, downgrading the salience of the CIA isn't a disposition that wins you friends, and consequently Mr. Gates had far fewer than the more CIA-centric Richard Helms, the operative turned bureaucrat turned central intelligence director, whom Mr. Gates in many ways resembles.
If Mr. Gates is to be a success as secretary of defense, he will have to show senior military officers, particularly within the Pentagon's Central Command (Centcom), which is responsible for Iraq, the attitude he once displayed toward operatives. Although Donald Rumsfeld has received the lion's share of the criticism for what's gone wrong in Iraq, senior U.S. military officers, most importantly Gen. John Abizaid, the lord of Centcom, are nearly as responsible for the mess.
The press has preferred to dwell on Mr. Rumsfeld -- as a force of nature, he is a compelling character. Also, former generals who loathe Mr. Rumsfeld have, intentionally or not, pre-empted criticism of active-duty generals by being so public in their denouncements of the secretary. And Gen. Abizaid, who has been since the summer of 2003 the grand military architect of America's counterinsurgency, is a highly intelligent, Harvard-educated, Arabic-speaking Arab-American -- in theory, just the person you would want to command U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Yet Gen. Abizaid's "light footprint" strategy -- the idea that a forceful American presence provokes more violence than it brings security -- was not foisted on him by Mr. Rumsfeld. The successful and it seems almost accidental battle at Tal Afar, where the U.S. deployed classical counterinsurgency techniques, and Gen. Abizaid's efforts to reduce the street presence of U.S. forces have clearly shown that security for Iraqis is directly proportional to the number of U.S. soldiers you put on contested ground.
The primary problem in Iraq since May 2003 has not been that Mr. Rumsfeld has been at war with his generals, whose advice he's supposedly refused to listen to. It's been that he and his generals, for sometimes differing reasons, have been in accord. Will Mr. Gates be inclined to reverse the strategy and tactics of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Abizaid? In other words, can he be a general-defying anti-establishmentarian? Mr. Gates's past -- his meteoric rise in the CIA and the National Security Council, his profound loyalty to his bosses, his presidency of the National Eagle Scout Association -- suggests that he doesn't like making waves.
Mr. Rumsfeld has rightly been criticized for his lack of interest in postwar planning. He brought to this war and to the conflict in Afghanistan, which also isn't going well, a mania for transformational warfare that at its core says you can do more with less.
Mr. Rumsfeld was undoubtedly right, and his Cold War-educated generals were wrong, about the forces necessary to vanquish Saddam's armed forces. But occupying foreign countries and counterinsurgencies, which both demand large numbers of not particularly sophisticated foot soldiers, are cruel to the secretary's transformational creed -- which seems perfectly sensible if America only aspires to blow things up overseas. Mr. Rumsfeld also brought to our post-9/11 battlefields a particularly conservative notion that nanny-state welfare-ism is bad for people, and that America's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, if it were to be protracted or profound, would keep both countries from growing up. When applied to Iraq, however, with its enormous potential for sectarian rage, where U.S. military power was essential to keeping order and the thickly intertwined but stressed bonds between the Shiite and Sunni Arab communities intact, this attitude helped produce the conflagration now destroying the country.
It is a relief to see that Mr. Gates isn't, so far as the public record shows, enamored of the idea that America's ground forces need to be shrunk and "transformed." If Mr. Gates is defined by service to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- who never gave up on the idea that the U.S. needed to have sufficient ground, naval and air forces to fight two wars simultaneously -- we can only hope that he'll urge the president to reverse Mr. Rumsfeld's less-is-more doctrine, which could not even handle the insurgency of Iraq's minority, revanchist Sunni community when it was small-scale and the Shia hadn't yet gone on a vengeful warpath. It's not clear whether Mr. Gates would agree with Mr. Rumsfeld on the dangers of U.S. military welfare in Iraq.
As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey Group, of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq -- except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.
If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less -- a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy -- and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it -- before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.
However, when the ISG bombs, the Bush administration may finally get serious about correcting its mistakes in Iraq. It's a decent bet that when this happens, America's military officers may start to miss Donald Rumsfeld. He was the best cover any failing general could ever have.
Mr. Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the Iraq Survey Group.
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