Don Rumsfield not writing his goodbye speech just yet

Via Red State:

Listen up, countrymen--I come to praise Rumsfeld, not to bury him.

By [email protected] (Redstate Network) on War

Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense on Wednesday, but he will remain in his post for some months while the transition to Robert Gates takes place. And yesterday he suggested that those months of transition (and beyond) may not be devoid of activity--indeed, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, Mr. Rumsfeld's most difficult but most important work for the Bush administration may well lie ahead of him.

While a lesser man might have sulked in his tent after resigning in response to a bad election cycle, Mr. Rumsfeld went about business as usual and delivered a noteworthy address at Kansas State University. In a way, Mr. Rumsfeld may feel liberated to start articulating some broader-reaching long-term goals for the DoD and the government. In the Q&A he declined to give specific advice to Mr. Gates, possibly because he had already done so in a speech that sketches out a broad plan for systemic government reform expanding on the transformation program Mr. Rumsfeld has so ably implemented at the Pentagon.

Secretary Rumsfeld was in Kansas to celebrate KSU alum and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, who is having a new building named for him on campus. General Myers is one of the many among the top military brass who have been rumored in the press to secretly oppose Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership of the Pentagon. That has never seemed terribly likely to me, and General Myers reinforced my opinion yesterday in his introductory remarks:

...

It is in many ways unfortunate that one of the few people who truly understand the nature of this terrible foe is now leaving the Bush administration. But I understand the political reality that made Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation nigh on inevitable after Tuesday. Elections happen, and what sets us apart from our enemies is that their ramifications are peacefully implemented in this country. While I do not agree that Iraq was in and of itself the defining factor in this election (voters overwhelmingly named "corruption" as their most important issue), it is the most important issue among the newly-elected congressional majority, who have signalled their intentions:

House Democrats say they plan to set up a new committee next year focused on uncovering abuses in defense spending and policies, and possibly an independent commission to investigate waste and fraud associated with the billions of dollars spent to rebuild Iraq. Implementing unfulfilled recommendations by the 9/11 commission -- such as plugging holes in airport security -- is also on their agenda.

'It's going to be hearings, accountability, trying to restore trust so the people understand what the real facts are,' said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., the Marine veteran who last year called for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and helped crystallize congressional opposition to the war.

It seems logical to conclude that Mr. Rumsfeld had wind of this plan in early October and that the "thoughtful discussions" in which he engaged with the President leading up to the election were largely centered on this topic. This perspective makes all the more meaningful Mr. Rumsfeld's decision to boost troop levels in Baghdad in October; he noted in a recent press conference that:

"I remember going up on the Hill and people saying to me, "Oh, what's the October surprise going to be? You're going to reduce a whole bunch of troops or produce Osama or something?" And well, the October surprise was, we increased troop levels. (Chuckles.) Why? Because it was the right thing to do."

It was the right thing to do so Mr. Rumsfeld did it rather than engineer a temporary reduction of forces that might have extended his tenure at the Pentagon, but which would have undermined the mission. And he chuckled, knowing full well how his good deed most likely would be rewarded.

What the re-empowered Mr. Murtha proposes are not policy hearings on Iraq along the lines of what will occur in the Senate Armed Services Committee next week, but rather a witch hunt that will be facilitated by the Byzantine budgeting process that funds the DoD. One can only imagine the mountains of paper that will be subpoenaed. Remember the infamous $436 hammer that inspired former Vice-President Al Gore to create "The Hammer Award?" That's going to be child's play compared to the dissection of the Afghanistan and Iraq books. I'm not suggesting that there is any deliberate or systemic impropriety in the accounting for the war, but there are sure to be such hammers to be found in a campaign of this scale, as well as funding processes that were developed to enable timely progress in both campaigns as conditions on the ground changed more rapidly than the current system could support. Secretary Rumsfeld signaled as much in his KSU speech:

The realities on the ground in the rest of the world do not correspond to the yearly federal budgetary process -- where it can take one year to craft a budget, another to get it approved by Congress, and then a third year to execute that then somewhat stale program.

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