Combining
the audacity of Grant at Vicksburg with a degree of speed
and precision never before seen on Earth, the invasion of
Iraq "was the utter vindication of Rumsfeld's transformation,"
an impressed European diplomat said not long ago. "And,"
he added, "also its downfall." For there was a crack
in this machinery that would be exposed if Iraq was not wrapped
up quickly.
Rumsfeld
spoke of this internal flaw, briefly and elliptically, during
the interview in his office. He was describing the Pentagon
as an Industrial Age contraption of rattling "conveyor
belts" onto which huge weapons purchases and fat plans
are loaded months and even years before they will come to
fruition. The belts clatter along, beyond human reach, until
finally they dump their loads, whether or not America needs
them anymore.
"To
have affected it, you had to have affected it five or six
years ago -- or at least two or three years ago," Rumsfeld
said of the system. So his mission, as he described it, was
to get his hands into the machinery and start hauling resources
off some belts so he could load new projects onto others.
"I've had to reach in and grab all those conveyor belts
and try to make them rationalize, one against another."
This process of moving resources from belt to belt he calls
"balancing risks." As in, the risk of not having
a supercannon, compared with the risk of not spending enough
money on satellites.
This
is where the problem of Iraq came in. Rumsfeld explained that
he has had to "balance risks between a war plan -- an
investment in something immediately -- and an investment in
something in the future." This opened a small window
into a very important section of his thinking. Bush recently
compared the war in Iraq to World War II, which implies a
total commitment. Without a doubt, from Pearl Harbor to V-J
Day, the war effort was the only military conveyor belt worth
mentioning. By contrast, Rumsfeld has conceived of Iraq on
a smaller scale, as just one of many hungry conveyor belts
inside his Pentagon.
He
understood that as soon as the Iraq belt started rolling,
it would carry resources away from his preferred investments
in the future. So he speaks of his job as a matter of reaching
onto that belt and pulling stuff off. "Balance"
in this context is another word for "limit" -- limit
the amount of money, troops, staff and materiel bound for
Iraq. The war he wanted was a short one, involving a relatively
small force that would start heading home as soon as Saddam
was chased from his palaces. When Army generals urged him
instead to load the Iraq conveyor belt with enough troops
to fully occupy the country -- securing captured weapons depots,
patrolling borders, ensuring order -- Rumsfeld saw the large
fixed cost involved in recruiting and training thousands of
new troops, a cost that would rattle down Pentagon belts for
years to come. He tried to balance those risks of chaos against
the conveyor belts that could otherwise be loaded with resources
destined for future transformation.
It
was a gamble, and one he has stuck with through round after
round of raised stakes. Of course, the irony is that the Iraq
effort has been the opposite of cheap and short. Despite Rumsfeld's
best efforts, it is a budget-buster, and one can almost hear
the conveyor belts destined for his transformed tomorrow grinding
to a halt, one by one.
