At Least Robert McNamara Felt Personally Responsible

No one who wasn’t employed by Donald Rumsfeld would ever argue that he wasn’t the worst secretary of defense since Robert McNamara, but Robert Draper mines the depths of Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon in GQ and emerges with new disgraces. Watch Rumsfeld cynically present Bush with briefings on the invasion of Iraq that portray the conflict in millennial and crusader-ish terms. (As U.S. armored vehicles drive under the Hands of Victory, an epigram quotes Isaiah 26:2: “Open the gates so the righteous nation may enter; the nation that keeps faith.” Message: convert or be destroyed.) His bureaucratic intransigence during Hurricane Katrina has long been overlooked — well, maybe not by everyone — and it’s horrifying to read how someone could have so willfully failed to help his countrymen as they drowned.

At the same time, what Draper presents is a collection of Bush aides who blame Rumsfeld for the administration’s failures, and not, say, the president who hired him for six years or the vice president who served as his bureaucratic patron after spending a career as his protege. Bush didn’t show Rumsfeld the door because of his role in exacerbating two failing wars. He fired him because the Republicans lost power. Dick Cheney publicly disagreed with dumping Rumsfeld, and in calling him “the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had” reconfirmed why it’s safe to ignore the man’s judgment. (Rumsfeld’s replacement, meanwhile, is making a strong case for himself as the finest defense secretary ever.) From the perspective of the Republican Party more broadly, this is rather laughable:

“I think most Republicans believe that if Rumsfeld had been dismissed before the election, we would’ve hung on to the Senate,” says South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham. “I think they’re probably right.”

Is there any evidence at all to support this counterfactual conditional? In any case, I await Rumsfeld’s memoir for a rebuttal. The War of Magical Thinking will be joined.