A Warrior Fighting the Wrong War
A Warrior Fighting the Wrong War is the title of Nate Fick’s Washington Post review of By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld by Bradley Graham.
Book Description
A penetrating political biography of the controversial Defense Secretary, by a longtime military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post.
Once considered among the best and brightest of his generation, Donald Rumsfeld was exceptionally prepared to assume the Pentagon’s top job in 2001. Yet six years later, he left office as the most controversial Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara, widely criticized for his management of the Iraq war and for his difficult relationships with Congress, administration colleagues, and military officers. Was he really the arrogant, errant, over-controlling Pentagon leader frequently portrayed–or as his supporters contend, a brilliant, hard-charging visionary caught in a whirl of polarized Washington politics, dysfunctional federal bureaucracy, and bad luck?
Bradley Graham, who closely covered Rumsfeld’s challenging tenure at the Pentagon, offers an insightful biography of a complex and immensely influential personality. What emerges is a layered and revealing portrait of a man whose impact on U.S. national security affairs will long out-live him.
A Warrior Fighting the Wrong War – Nathaniel Fick, Washington Post.
“The blizzard is over!” Donald Rumsfeld declared in the last of some 20,000 memos — or “snowflakes” — that had become a hallmark of his contentious tenure as secretary of defense. During the summer of 2003, a squall of snowflakes and counter-snowflakes blew through the offices of Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, the newly appointed head of U.S. Central Command, about the definitions of “insurgent” and “guerrilla warfare.” Rumsfeld, over Abizaid’s objections, resisted acknowledging the enemy in Iraq as an organized force because doing so would have suggested that the U.S. presence there was likely to be long and costly. But his denial merely delayed the inevitable, and, as in a real snowstorm, the cleanup began only after the last flake fell.
Rumsfeld is not a simple man. But the two biggest questions about his tenure at the Pentagon — why the United States invaded Iraq, and why it so bungled the aftermath of the Hussein regime’s fall — are often answered with only the simplest of explanations: ideology and hubris.
In this meticulously researched and compelling book, veteran Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham acknowledges these contributors to the national-security travails of the Bush years, but he highlights another as well: the secretary of defense’s unwavering commitment to military transformation, his vision of a leaner, more lethal Department of Defense. The early phases of the war in Afghanistan apparently vindicated this concept, while the prospect of war in Iraq promised a wider proving ground for it – but the nasty counterinsurgency campaign that followed threatened to undermine it…
More at The Washington Post.