A memoir isn't enough to rehabilitate the careers of today's disgraced public officials. Any case you make for yourself is damaged by the fact that you're the one making it. A shrewder tactic is to go full-on Assange, releasing formerly secret documents that you can say prove you were right all along. And so here's Donald Rumsfeld, doing his best WikiLeaks impression to accompany his new book.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, there are few rhetorical tactics Rumsfeld can employ to satisfy his hordes of critics. So he's accompanying his memoir, Known and Unknown, with tons of primary source material: hundreds of raw documents detailing his thought process at the Pentagon, all searchable on his new website. This way, he's not engaging with a debate he's unlikely to win; he's burying it under an avalanche of paper.
To put it uncharitably: when you've got a rep for being less-than-honest and unwilling to debate, you might as well let the documents speak for themselves.
So take, for instance, the document that Rumsfeld's promoting on his website. It's a Sept. 9, 2002 summary from the Joint Chiefs' top intelligence official confessing that U.S. assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction "rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence." Rumsfeld told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to "take a look" at the memo, because "what we don't know about WMD ... is big."
Aha! Rumsfeld was a voice for moderation on the Iraq WMD all along! He looks pretty good for bravely disclosing that, right? Not when you remember that after he received that summary, he continued to portray the evidence against Iraq as ironclad, up to and after the invasion. ("We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.")
Or take Afghanistan. On Jan. 23, 2002, Rumsfeld told subordinates that stockpiling old weapons could be a cost-effective way to equip a new Afghan army. Not a bad idea, except that building that army was a low priority for his Pentagon.
Contemplating "complications" for U.S. defense strategy, on May 21, 2001, Rumsfeld acknowledged "the U.S. military has no doctrine for police work. Shouldn't we have some work going on with respect to that?" Maybe it would have helped in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in April 2002, Rumsfeld dismissed concerns that U.S. forces needed to be involved in securing the peace with a quippy "Ah, peacekeeping."
Rumsfeld's documents show him worrying about military interrogations. "I don't feel I have good data on the people we have been capturing and interrogating in either country," he told his intel chief, Steve Cambone, on Sept. 12, 2003. "I don't feel I am getting information from the interrogations that should be enabling us as to the answer to the questions I've posed." Probing. But perhaps Rumsfeld might have considered that before changing the rules for military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, which "migrated" to Iraq, to allow more brutal treatment.
Rumsfeld isn't the first to take this documentation-based approach. His policy chief, Douglas Feith, under fire for sexing up intelligence on Saddam Hussein's relationship with al-Qaeda, accompanied his 2008 War and Decision with a searchable online supplement of his own documents from the Pentagon.
Of course, RummyLeaks ain't quite WikiLeaks: his documents have been officially declassified, and many paint him in quite the flattering light, on their face. But like WikiLeaks' trove of war documents, Rumsfeld leaves it up to his readers to dig through a huge trove to find their own gems. A transparency measure, sure. But one that has the effect of snowing a reader under a ton of data, leaving them in the meantime with the narrative that he's shaping.
And Rumsfeld isn't just learning from Assange. He's on a social media tear. Since joining Twitter in October, @RumsfeldOffice has stroked the rhetorical erogenous zones of his conservative followers, all in time for his public reemergence. Sample tweet: "100 years after President #Reagan's birth, it is worth remembering that the Cold War didn't just end. It was won."
He's done high profile media interviews to promote the book -- which, in all fairness, I have yet to read. But we'll see if Rumsfeld's new transparency strategy provides him with much public vindication.
Photo: DoD
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