Kicking a man when he’s down

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost.

But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.

Donald Rumsfeld, the now disgraced former Secretary of Defense of the United States, was as credulous a believer in the miraculous powers of technology as any devotee of the healing cult of a saint’s relics. He combined this credulity with a lack of understanding of the inherent limitations of power, however great. The weakest person, thank goodness, can subvert the intentions and purposes of the most powerful. Power affects: it does not determine.

This book is a relentlessly hostile account of the man and his career. Such hostility on the part of an author towards his subject is inclined to produce a protective reaction in the reader: for the boot being so firmly on the author’s foot, the reader wants to protect the subject from the kicking he receives. Rumsfeld’s arrogance, however, does not encourage such protectiveness. Physiognomy, no doubt, is an inexact science, but his face does not invite compassion.

Having been both the youngest and the oldest Secretary of Defense in his country’s history, it is only to be expected that he is a highly intelligent man. Unfortunately, he seems to have applied his intelligence mainly to mastering the dark arts of bureaucratic manipulation and ascent. Even as a businessman in between his spells as Secretary of Defense he acted more as an intermediary with government than as an entrepreneur properly so-called. He made his fortune mainly by guiding large companies through the regulatory shoals in Washington, in the process helping to put an artificial sweetener, aspartame, of doubted safety, on the market. Rumsfeld appears to owe most of his fortune, then, to the existence of what Indians used to call the licence raj.

The author somewhat over-eggs the pudding, however, in his depiction of his subject’s character. Every last act is interpreted as a manifestation of his ambition. His choice of ideology, for example, was based not on any perception of truth, but of use in the advancement of his career. Yet we hear of him singing the praises of aspartame long after he has any need to do so, and he is genuinely surprised when no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq. In other words, if he was a deceiver, he was also a self-deceiver; and self-deceit tacitly implies some adherence to the notion of truth and of the immorality of deceiving others. On the other hand, self-deceivers are probably more dangerous than out-and-out rogues.

The author is ambiguous about his own attitude towards the US military. One suspects that, in another context, he would happily have used Donald Rumsfeld’s opinions of their innate conservatism as a stick to beat them with. In other words, the author’s use of the testimony of military personnel to Rumsfeld’s arrogance and incompetence is more tactical than strategic. I doubt whether, in other contexts, he would have quoted generals with such deference.

In addition, the general reader rather than the political obsessive might soon grow weary of the details of Rumsfeld’s intrigues which take up quite a proportion of the book. Such intrigues are common even in the smallest institutions; they are fascinating mainly to those who take part in them.

If power is almost as much a matter of prestige as of firepower, Donald Rumsfeld has done his country no great service. Even supporters of the war in Iraq now concede that it was badly planned and executed, and that hubris has been duly followed by nemesis. To change the metaphor slightly, Rumsfeld was a convenient scapegoat for his master, because he was likely to elicit so little sympathy in that role. He was always a bureaucrat rather than a politician, and never learnt to ingratiate himself with a large audience, for which he always had an obvious contempt. Despite his self-conceit, he was expendable, and was expended.

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