Rumsfeld vs. Zakaria

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was Fareed Zakaria's guest this morning on CNN.

I admired Zakaria's polite but firm determination to keep Rumsfeld from spewing his usual, probably by now instinctive talking points. Zakaria, for instance, asked Rumsfeld if he had any regrets about his time as defense secretary; Rumsfeld, after his usual condescension cloaked as folksiness ("My goodness, of course everyone has regrets"; "that's a typical journalist's question"), started down a well-worn path, invoking his "regret" that "young men and women are hurt, some of them killed" in military operations. Before he could complete that thought, though, Zakaria gently corrected him: "Those are feelings of sadness, not regret", and again pushed Rumsfeld to answer the question. Thrown off base, Rumsfeld claimed the Bush administration should have been more explicit in declaring Islam the enemy, and cited Cold War administrations' willingness to define the Soviet Union in that way. His approving citation of Eisenhower in this regard, though, prompted Zakaria to challenge him on the overwhelming size of the U.S. defense budget: Eisenhower regarded the military-industrial complex with great suspicion and worried about it growing too large.

Rumsfeld, it transpires, wants it all as far as defense is concerned. He wants the U.S. to be able to deter conventional attacks from nation-states and to be able to deter insurgencies. I don't know how the U.S. would "deter" insurgencies in other countries, but even if you generously assume Rumsfeld meant that the U.S. should have the ability to defeat such movements if it decided to engage them, the question arises, exactly why should the U.S. play the role of global cop? A related and possibly even more important question today is, can the U.S. afford to play that role?

Those are questions for which Rumsfeld has no patience. He is unabashedly enthusiastic about U.S. hegemony, viewing it as a net positive for the whole world.

That's a matter of faith, in my opinion. You can cite examples of positive effects of U.S. hegemony as expressed through military operations, but you can certainly cite examples of negative effects, too. And just as my objections will (would) never sway Rumsfeld, his objections to my strong desire for less military intervention will never sway me.

Zakaria pushed Rumsfeld to say whether the Bush administration's interventionist militarism had been worth the cost, pointing out bluntly that everything must be subject to a cost/benefit analysis. I don't remember even the gist of Rumsfeld's response, but I know I would remember if he had tackled the question head-on.

Rumsfeld is uninterested in piffling details like whether an action is justifiable in advance according to its foreseeable costs and benefits. Instead, he seeks ex post facto justifications -- friendly fallout, if you will -- when challenged on past actions. He is perfectly happy, for instance, to cite the unforeseen benefit of Qadafi's renunciation of nuclear weapons to bolster his assertion that the invasion of Iraq was justified. Left hanging in the air is the question, "But why did you want to go into Iraq in the first place?" (By now, we know that the Bush administration had no publicly palatable answer. Indeed, its confused and everchanging justifications for the invasion have left a lot of us wondering if one of the early, seemingly crackpot explanations -- Bush 43's desire to surpass his father, Bush 41 -- actually is true.)

Rumsfeld is unwilling, or possibly unable, to revisit past thoughts and actions with an eye to identifying possible errors. In Rumsfeld's mind, he commits no errors of any consequence. He looks at everything through the prism of his own certitude. It's no coincidence, I aver, that such unconsidered sureness was the worst characteristic of the Bush administration as a whole: I don't doubt that Rummy was a comfortable fit for his boss and his cronies.

Such an unwillingness (or inability) to assess his own thoughts and decisions in light of their consequences makes Rumsfeld an extremely untrustworthy source of information. Not only does he often make bad decisions, he commits the worse sin of not learning from his mistakes. We can't trust his self-serving and possibly deluded "reflections". This was the most important information Zakaria elicited in his interview.