[Mb-civic] Replace Rumsfeld - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Replace Rumsfeld
<>
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, April 14, 2006; A17

With luck, Iraq will make a fresh start soon with the formation of a new 
government. The Bush administration should do the same thing by 
replacing Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

Rumsfeld has lost the support of the uniformed military officers who 
work for him. Make no mistake: The retired generals who are speaking out 
against Rumsfeld in interviews and op-ed pieces express the views of 
hundreds of other officers on active duty. When I recently asked an Army 
officer with extensive Iraq combat experience how many of his colleagues 
wanted Rumsfeld out, he guessed 75 percent. Based on my own 
conversations with senior officers over the past three years, I suspect 
that figure may be low.

But that isn't the reason he should be replaced. Military officers often 
dislike the civilians they work for, but in our system strong civilian 
control is essential. On some of the issues over which he has tangled 
with the military brass, Rumsfeld has been right. The Pentagon is a 
hidebound place, and it has needed the "transformation" ethic Rumsfeld 
brought to his job. I'm dubious about the Pentagon conventional wisdom 
that we needed 500,000 American troops in Iraq. More troops were 
necessary, but they should have been Iraqi troops from an army that 
wasn't disbanded.

Rumsfeld should resign because the Bush administration is losing the war 
on the home front. As bad as things are in Baghdad, America won't be 
defeated there militarily. But it may be forced into a hasty and chaotic 
retreat by mounting domestic opposition to its policy. Much of the 
American public has simply stopped believing the administration's 
arguments about Iraq, and Rumsfeld is a symbol of that credibility gap. 
He is a spent force, reduced to squabbling with the secretary of state 
about whether "tactical errors" were made in the war's conduct.

The Bush administration has rightly been insisting that the Iraqis put 
unity first and that in forming a permanent government they remove 
ineffectual and divisive leaders and replace them with people who can 
pull the country together. The administration should heed its own 
advice. America needs leadership that can speak to the whole country, 
not just the people who already agree with the president.

Rumsfeld's replacement should be someone who can help restore a 
bipartisan consensus for a sensible Iraq policy. One obvious candidate 
would be the centrist Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman. Another would be a 
centrist Republican with military experience, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel 
or Sen. John McCain. The administration would have to swallow its pride 
to take any of them on board, but that's the point: Without bold moves 
from the White House, support for the war will continue to slip away.

It now seems clear that President Bush can't erase the Iraq credibility 
gap on his own. He has been trying to rebuild consensus for the war for 
months, in a series of speeches and strategy papers. But the poll 
numbers keep going down. His job approval ratings have fallen below 40 
percent in all the latest polls, with Post-ABC News at 38 percent, 
CNN-USA Today-Gallup at 37 percent and Fox-Opinion Dynamics at 36 
percent. Support for the war has crumbled even more sharply. The latest 
Post-ABC poll found that 58 percent of the country now feels the war 
wasn't worth fighting, compared with 27 percent back in April 2003.

If the Iraqis can form a unity government -- and that's certainly a big 
"if" -- they will need America's help in pulling the country back from 
civil war. America now has a better military strategy for Iraq, one that 
puts more responsibility on Iraqi forces and emphasizes 
counterinsurgency tactics. And it has a political strategy that is at 
last reaching out to all the different Iraqi communities -- Sunni, 
Shiite and Kurd -- rather than to a handful of former exile leaders. 
This political-military strategy may fail, but it's too soon to make 
that call. To buy some time, the administration needs a new political 
base. If it continues with the same team, it will get the same result.

Rumsfeld is a stubborn man, and I suspect the parade of retired generals 
calling for his head has only made him more determined to hold on. But 
by staying in his job, Rumsfeld is hurting the cause he presumably cares 
most about. The president, even more stubborn than his Pentagon chief, 
is said to have rejected his offer to resign. If that's so, it's time 
for Rumsfeld to take the matter out of Bush's hands.

The administration needs to look this one clearly in the eye: Without 
changes that shore up public support in America, it risks losing the war 
in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301238.html?nav=hcmodule
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