High noon for Rumsfeld?

Everyone in America has an opinion of Donald Rumsfeld. In an administration that has been polarising to say the least, he stands out as easily its most divisive figure: loved and hated in equal measure. There is no doubting that – as Bob Woodward said – within the administration, it is the secretary of defense who alone has real intellectual sparkle among the senior foreign policy decision-makers.

As both the youngest and oldest secretary of defense (he served in the position in his early 40s, from 1975-77, in the Gerald Ford administration), a former congressman, and former White House chief of staff, there are few who have navigated the treacherous shoals of Washington as ably as Rumsfeld. In the eyes of many average Americans his heroism on 11 September 2001, when he ignored secret service requests that he leave the Pentagon and instead helped pull servicemen out of the rubble, permanently endeared him to millions.

As secretary of defense, Rumsfeld has presided over two stunningly decisive wars. Many in Europe (remember the cries that the US would suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and that Baghdad would be another Stalingrad?) speculated that such victories would never happen.

But there is another version of the Donald Rumsfeld story that makes the rounds in Washington. Rumsfeld does not suffer fools gladly; and he lives in a town with a surprising number of them. His capacity to make enemies, to be dismissive toward those who may think more slowly (or differently) than he, can easily cross over the line into arrogance. This means that there are many who are not devastated that he finds his career in peril over the abuses of the Iraqi prisoners that have been relayed in sickening detail all over the world.

Personally, let me make this clear. Everyone I have spoken to about these abuses – be they Democrat, or Republican, expert in domestic or foreign policy, with the executive or the legislative branch – understands the damage this has done. Any hopes of pushing President Bush’s amorphous initiative for democracy in the Greater Middle East – never likely in my opinion – are now gone. United States public diplomacy, already in a perilous state, is now in an open freefall around the world. And we all know this.

The only good news in this appalling tale is that so does the secretary of defense. I have just finished listening to his grueling three hours of testimony before a properly outraged Senate armed services committee. It was a vintage Rumsfeld performance – quick-witted, forthright, candid. The secretary even had the savoir faire calmly to drink water while the inevitable protestors demonstrated in the Dirksen Senate Office Building before being led away. His whole manner seemed to suggest: “time for the grown-ups to deal with this problem.”

He took full responsibility for what occurred, and said he was anguished by what happened, and that such acts “offended and outraged everyone.” His pledge to make amends was bolstered by three specific policy initiatives. First, he pledged to appoint a bipartisan committee comprised of former senior government officials to investigate the state of the six ongoing investigations into the torture allegations, to expedite the process while allowing the accused to have their day in court. Second, he called for a review of all department of defense procedures relating to both the guarding of prisoners and their interrogation. Third, he urged that the torture victims be provided with compensation.

Strikingly, Rumsfeld said things would get worse before they got better, that many more pictures of the human rights violations would surface, and (even worse from the administration’s point of view) that videos existed of the acts of torture and could make their way into the media. He ended by saying: “judge us by our actions, the world should look at how a democracy deals with scandal.”

For those who favour the positive view of Donald Rumsfeld, this is the nub of the matter. Surely the secretary is right to point out to moral relativists everywhere (besides the obvious massive discrepancies in numbers) that under Saddam such excruciating self-examination would never have occurred; that in trying to correct the horrific acts committed in Abu Ghraib prison, Rumsfeld is rightly exemplifying what is best about America – the ability to act in times of great crisis, to acknowledge fundamental problems and attempt to make them better.

This, of course, will elicit no sympathy from the many in the world who believe this administration in particular, and America in general, is the major impediment to a more decent, stable planet. It would seem banal to mention (but things are so bad I think first principles are called for here) that in the 20th century there were five real world choices for ordering powers: the Kaiser’s Germany, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and America. For all its present problems, there is little doubt that, given this terrible list, only America would have witnessed the grilling the secretary of defense has just – rightly – endured.

I can only echo Rumsfeld, a week on from waking up in my nice Virginia farm to retch at what I saw on the front page – “judge us by how we correct a great wrong.”