One thing many people forget about Donald Rumsfeld: he didn’t really want to do Iraq. Oh, he did in the sense that Cheney did, and for many of the same reasons. But he was never a Neocon. Securing The Realm and subjugating the Arab/Islamic self-esteem not his primary concern.
His two big priorities were what has now degenerated into a pathetic bureaucratic joke – defense ‘transformation’ – and special operations/forces. He was afraid Iraq would derail his transformation agenda by strengthening conventional force mindset. We know Rummy’s effort to make Iraq a transformative showcase war turned Tommy Frank’s unimaginative plodding into an incoherent ‘fiasco’. Tommy Franks wasn’t the only bungler.
On the plus side of the ledger [from his point of view], Rumsfeld and his coterie tried to unleash SOCOM (and parallel contractors) first. Like another historical figure before him, Rummy found that rather than having to fight to control the mastiff’s leash, he found merely a moribund, sleepy dog and a depressingly slack chain. Oh, the special forces people reporting to him might sit and roll over. If pressed. But spontaneously chase a ball or squirrel with vigor? With joy of the hunt? Nope.
Rummy eventually radicalized the special forces community to his liking. But he had to overcome alot of conservative military inertia. Only after years of careerists seeing that there really are no consequences in America anymore did they fully join the game. Initially with a ‘Why the f**k not?” and now with gusto. It’s all true what critics say: Rumsfeld’s passive aggressive style of maximizing control and seeming paralytic inability to make decisions proved catastrophic. Yet he understood before DoD and most in the White House (except for Wayne Downing) that a militarized ‘Long War’ would be fought and ‘won’ [in some vague sense] by special forces. It was Rummy first, not this White House, who tempted special forces with the Faustian offer of a blank powerpoint slide: ‘What do you need?’ That was 8 years ago.