Should Rumsfeld have been fired before the elections?

In the usual recriminations that follow defeat, especially a defeat as crushing as losing control of both Houses of the US Congress in one bloodbath of an election, Republicans are now arguing over whether former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have been dismissed from his post before last week’s polls.

The argument is that if he had been fired before the elections, it might have helped Republican candidates, especially those locked in tight races. Because he was let go after, while it might have helped President George W. Bush get a "fresh start" on Iraq, the gesture did nothing for party mates who lost by razor-thin margins.

Most of the losing candidates felt particularly miffed when in his first press conference after that day of infamy, Bush confessed that he had been considering the departure of Rumsfeld for some time because they both thought the embattled Defense chief should leave and allow for new thinking on the war.

Neither Bush nor Rumsfeld, of course, acknowledged that their Iraq policy had failed. The latter did complain, in his valedictory speech at the Oval House, that the policy had been "little understood," thus throwing a last dart at Democratic blowhards who, he felt, couldn’t get into their thick skulls what that policy was all about.

That admission, though, has led to charges that the President "misled" the American people because a scant few days before the November debacle, Bush was still singing the praises of Rumsfeld, insisting that he retained his highest confidence and that he wasn’t on the way out.

In response, Bush gave the perfectly plausible explanation that he didn’t want the war to be exploited as a political issue in the elections, never mind that the polls were blaring alarm signals all over the place that Iraq and not the economy was the hot button issue. If he had fired Rumsfeld then, Bush argued, it might have been treated as an admission of the failure of a policy that he had supported, if not himself initiated. Far from helping Republican candidates, that might instead have sealed their fate.

All this supports the view that George W. Bush was indeed the issue in the last US elections. Neither the economy nor local issues dictated voters’ preferences in the essentially local races for senators and congressmen.

It was, quite simply, a referendum on Bush and his handling of the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan and the over-all, multi-front war against terrorism. On that score, he still does not come out too nicely. Even after giving Don Rumsfeld his walking papers, Bush is still scoring below 40% on public confidence in his ability to handle the Iraq war.

Whether bipartisanship can be a reality will be tested in the impending confirmation hearings of new Defense Secretary Robert Gates and "recess appointee" United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. On whether we have bullfights or love-fests will determine whether we eventually see bipartisan patriotism unfolding, or whether it will be the same old partisan, vested-interest politics that will rear its ugly head.

Robert Gates is expected to be intensely questioned, especially about his role in the Contra anomalies which hounded Ronald Reagan. But in the end, he will be confirmed, if only because the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, of which he is a member, is expected to present new options for abbreviating American exposure, and eventually winning, the war in that divided nation. Gates will implement those new options.

At some point, the Democrats are going to have to stop finger-pointing and belie the attack ads during the campaign which charged that they could bellyache better than they could present alternatives. The issue will, sooner rather than later, turn to how to get out as soon as possible, and how to win while doing it.

For the Iraq Study Group, the schedule of troop withdrawals is a huge problem, but hardly the biggest. It’s how to define "victory" that’s continuing to cause them headaches. There are those who, like the Wall Street Journal, profess alarm at the return of Bush 41 (a.k.a. the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush) stalwarts.

They predict intense debates between the Bush 41 "realists" and the Bush 43 neoconservatives. The realists push for a pragmatic approach to policies. Neocons tend to cling to dogmas about the irrevocable spread of democracy and the continuing validity of the Bush 43 doctrines of pre-emptive war and "us against them." The realists will have to convince the neocons that the US can accept less than total victory, i.e. that the US didn’t win, but it didn’t lose either.

The new lightning rod, now that Rumsfeld has ridden into the sunset, could well be UN Ambassador John Bolton. Because he couldn’t get confirmation last time around – the opposition even included some Republicans – he now faces a Democrat-dominated foreign relations committee which allegedly lies in ambush.

This time, Bolton reportedly has the support of all Republicans on the committee because of his good performance on the job. The Democrats aren’t so convinced, and are still worried about the walrus-mustachioed Bolton’s reputation for intransigence and willingness to twist arms to get his and his boss’s way, ala Rumsfeld.

Wherever the confirmation hearings of Gates and Bolton turn, the expert assessment seems to be that Rumsfeld’s fate was the mere tip of a huge iceberg signifying deliberate flux in US policy on the war against terrorism, as work progresses on nothing less than a historic transformation of that policy.

We are all involved in that war, whether we like it or not. For that reason, our appreciation of what has happened in the leadership of the US Congress should not remain on the same level as guessing the result of a PBA championship game. Things are happening in Washington, against a background of rapidly changing global political and economic realities.

As changes inevitably occur, we can’t take false security in the notion that we, half a world away, can remain insulated and unaffected. Those times are gone.