“These events happened on my watch as secretary of defense. I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.” With those words, Donald Rumsfeld began a six-hour marathon of testimony to the Senate and House Armed Services committees on Friday about the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. He apologized to the Iraqis who have suffered and then, without his usual assertiveness, he and his team endured a barrage of little speeches and littler questions designed more to embarrass him into resigning than to get any facts about what happened in Iraq.
Ever since the confident and sometimes-combative Rumsfeld returned to a job he had held more than two decades before, his enemies have worked very hard to thwart his plans to rebuild America’s military and use it when called upon. The military brass–especially the now-departed army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki–fought him on transforming the Cold War military into one that can fight the new wars we will have to win. Some defense contractors and congressmen disliked him for trying to sink their pet programs. All of that was rendered insignificant on 9/11, when Donald Rumsfeld, corporate transformation manager, suddenly became Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of war.
A month later, we were at war in Afghanistan. We won–in a few months–in a place where the Soviet Union broke its armies for a decade before withdrawing in defeat. In the buildup to the Iraq war, Rumsfeld gained enemies of greater stature. His most dedicated detractors–the U.N. lovers, the effeteniks of Europe, Capitol Hill, the New York Times and CBS News–voiced their disdain for him daily. The NYT was perhaps the worst (as I said on March 23). It was so desperate to criticize Rumsfeld, they just made things up.
The Times fabulists–and the Chiracs, the Annans, the Rathers, and the Kerrys of the world–don’t hate him because of what happened at Abu Ghraib. They hate Donald Rumsfeld for what he is, and what he stands for. He doesn’t worship at the altar of the U.N.: He’d actually rather solve problems than talk about them forever. He is so tactless he actually calls Old Europe by its proper name. Worst of all, he is quite comfortable with the use of American military power in America’s interests. In sum, he’s one of us, not one of them. That’s why they hate him.
Friday began with a predictable NYT editorial entitled, “Donald Rumsfeld Should Go,” blaming him for taking us “into the swamp” of Iraq. The Friday hearings were thoroughly boring. One senator after another gave a speech and then (they were, mercifully, limited to five minutes each) asked a question. A few–John McCain chief among them–were downright nasty. The hearings were aimed, in part, to chasten Rumsfeld publicly, and to unhorse him if possible. This was the congressional anti-Bush caucus’s biggest chance to force a change in the strategies underlying our war against terrorists and the nations that support them.
In question after question, the attackers said that by deciding–as the president did in 2002–that terrorist prisoners weren’t covered by the Geneva Conventions, Bush created the policy that led directly to the abuse of prisoners. That, of course, is a lie. The decision correctly reads terrorists out of the third Geneva Convention, whose definitions of prisoners of war are broad, but clearly don’t include terrorists. By deciding that some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib aren’t POWs is simply to state the obvious. Some are held as mere criminals for “Iraqi on Iraqi” street crimes. Some are held as POWs, former members of the Saddam forces who wore uniforms and were under command of the regime (only two of the Geneva criteria). And some, like the so-called “foreign fighters”–terrorists from Iran, Syria, and their ilk–are held as non-POWs, outside the Geneva conditions. According to Rumsfeld’s testimony, at least 3,800 of them are members of the Iranian-backed terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalk organization.
But to say that a class of prisoners is not covered by Geneva is not to declare an open season on them for abuse. To the contrary. As White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez said in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post on Saturday, “At the same time [the president determined that Taliban and al-Queda prisoners wouldn’t be granted POW status], the president ordered that US armed forces treat detainees humanely and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the third Geneva Convention. Nothing about these decisions…provided any license or encouragement for what occurred at Abu Ghraib.” In fact, those decisions made possible two courses of action that are essential to our war against terrorists.
First, those prisoners who aren’t POWs and are suspected terrorists can be held incommunicado. Their intelligence value is not just what is in their heads. It is also in the fact that we have them. That their cohorts may not know they are in our custody means that any planned terrorist acts of which they know may go ahead, and if we succeed in interrogating them, we may be able to stop those attacks and capture or kill others involved. If the prisoners are known to have been captured, the value of their knowledge is diminished enormously, and their cohorts can change their plans to make attacks successful and evade capture. Under the Geneva Conventions, the identity of POWs must be disclosed. POWs are given the absolute right to correspond with their families within a week of capture. If we agree that terrorists are POWs, our ability to conceal their capture, and make the best use of the information they may disclose, is destroyed. For that reason alone, we cannot allow terrorist prisoners POW status.
Second, by deciding that detainees will be treated humanely “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity” is of equal importance. There are some prisoners who may have important information they will not give us willingly. These terrorists are not POWs under the third Geneva Convention. We must deal with terrorists differently than with POWs. We are within the law of war–and within our rights–to use chemically assisted interrogation against terrorists, to disrupt their biological clocks, and–as Rumsfeld almost said in his testimony–to disorient them and make interrogation more effective. Wesley Clark is wrong to say, as he did on Meet the Press, that all prisoners must be given POW status. It’s an ignorant and dangerous point of view.
So is the idea that Rumsfeld should go. He is the president’s minister of war and–after President Bush–the chief proponent of preemption of terrorist attacks. Many of those attacking him are using Abu Ghraib as an excuse. Their interest is in weakening the president’s policies of preemption and action independent of the U.N. and Old Europe. In 1848, Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, told parliament that a nation has no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests. There are only four senior members of the administration that understand this: the president, the vice president, Condi Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld. Answering the calls to fire Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney said this weekend, “People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.” We have a war to fight. Donald Rumsfeld is a significant weapon that we cannot afford to give up.
–Jed Babbin, an NRO contributor, is author of the forthcoming book, Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.