RUMSFELD: An American Disaster by Andrew Cockburn

Verso £17.99 pp248

WASHINGTON’S WAR: From Independence to Iraq by Michael Rose

Weidenfield £14.99 pp212

You know, I don’t think Andrew Cockburn likes the former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld very much. The clue is in the title of his book – and also in some of the chapter headings, such as A Ruthless Little Bastard and Warlord. Indeed, the loathing and bile drip from pretty much every page, the tone a sort of quietly amazed revulsion at its subject matter. I suppose Rumsfeld: An Objective Study would have been a much less entertaining read – but I suspect it would come to pretty much the same conclusions as those reached by Cockburn. The Rumsfeld that emerges here is almost comically incompetent; shallow, ignorant, opportunistic and vicious, and possessed of an overindulged controlling tendency. He also reveals himself to be, at various times, rude, vindictive and stupid. You wonder, reading this stuff, how he could have held high political office, on and off, for the best part of 40 years and why someone as sharp as Richard Nixon did not seem to understand the sort of man he was dealing with. His career outside politics is chronicled in full detail, too – Cockburn implies Rumsfeld inflicted brain tumours upon a proportion of the American population through his relentless lobbying on behalf of the artificial sweetener, aspartame. Oh, and then there was the energetic lobbying he did, allegedly, to ensure that North Korea could buy light-water nuclear reactors from the company of which he was a board member.

Cockburn cranks it up a gear with the events post 9/11; Rumsfeld’s stewardship in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the consequent lack of military strength to finish the job; Rumsfeld’s commitment to invading Iraq regardless of the total lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction and his ineptitude once Baghdad had fallen. He simply had not a clue what to do next – and nor, under the Rumsfeld Doctrine, were there enough men to do very much at all. Then there is his proactive and vigorous involvement in the plight of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, who Rumsfeld believed had no legal recourse to the strictures of the Geneva Convention because they were “unlawful combatants” and thus deserved whatever punishment he deemed suitable. “These are bad men, Mr President,” he told Bush, “and I think we ought to let people know that.” He urged “counter-resistance techniques” (ie what you and I would call torture) to be used against the detainees, but seemed to think that the Guantanamo interrogators were pussyfooting around. One measure approved by Rumsfeld involved making prisoners stand for four hours at a stretch. Rumsfeld accompanied his tick in the box with a scrawled note stating: “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” In lieu of an official response, Cockburn provides his own: “The answer, of course, was that he could always sit down if he felt like it and in any case wore specially made shoes, built up and filled with extra padding. His staff called them the duck shoes.”

There are the grotesque strategic and diplomatic blunders as Rumsfeld busied himself alienating any and every foreigner who might be of use to his country, Rumsfeld stamping about in his platform-heeled duck shoes estranging the Syrian, the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Lebanese. Rumsfeld was eventually brought down not by political opponents, of course, but by the very people who had been forced to endure his incompetence and arrogance – the US military generals. He is now reportedly writing a book to – as Cockburn puts it – “show what a success everything had been”.

Just how much of a success is made evident in Michael Rose’s strangely concocted study of guerrilla warfare, Washington’s War. Rose, a former director of UK Special Forces and Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia, has some claim to know of what he speaks. He argues that America has failed to understand how insurgencies can be defeated, or at least contained – and, once again, it is Rummy who stands accused. “Above all,” he writes, “at no stage during Operation Iraqi Freedom has the US-led coalition ever been able to protect the civilian population from the insurgents. From the outset of the war, Rumsfeld, like Lord Germain before him, consistently refused to meet calls to significantly increase US troop numbers in Iraq.”

The Germain to whom Rose refers was the British government’s secretary for America at the time of the war of independence, a man who similarly misjudged and misunderstood both the political and military potential of colonial rebels. And that seems to be the point of his book; that the mistakes made by the Americans in Iraq are almost identical to those made by the British in America 230 years before. I would not doubt that, militarily at least, he is right – but I’m not sure where it gets us. Further, Rose is forced by his thesis into ascribing a moral equivalence between the American rebels and Al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents in Iraq – a contentious position to hold, if you ask me. Still, Rose is shrewd and coruscating on America’s (and Britain’s) mistaken assumptions and tactical stupidity in Iraq and our joint insistence that military action can provide immediate solutions. And a fair amount of blame resides with that aforementioned “ruthless little bastard.”

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £13.49 (Rose) and £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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