Rumsfeld should be held accountable

When I heard President Bush praising Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld this week, my mind strayed to the story of two Army Reservists who’ve served months in the brig.

Maj. Cathy Kaus and Chief Warrant Officer Darrell Birt arrived in Kuwait in March 2003, but their unit didn’t get enough trucks to carry crucial equipment into Iraq. So the two officers commandeered some abandoned army trucks by the roadside, loaded up, and headed for Tikrit.

Their reward? A court-martial for theft, and dishonorable discharges.

“The soldiers were held accountable for their actions,” an Army spokesman said. In other words, Kaus and Darrell were punished for breaking the rules so their troops could carry out their mission.

But no one holds Rumsfeld accountable for undermining the mission and undercutting the troops.

The recent flap over unarmored humvees — and Rumsfeld’s flip remarks to a reservist who complained about having to scavenge for armor — are part of a bigger pattern.

There’s a reason why 50,000 reservists were sent to war in 2003 with outdated body armor, and families had to raise funds to send their loved ones Kevlar vests with ceramic plates. There’s a reason so many humvees and trucks are still unarmored.

There’s a reason Kaus and Birt had to improvise to sustain their mission: Rumsfeld refused to recognize the nature of the situation into which he sent those troops.

Rumsfeld was so eager to test out his new, lean military machine that he didn’t want to plan for the likelihood of instability after Saddam fell. The State Department, the CIA, and many military commanders all urged that more forces be available to establish order after the war.

No way, said Rumsfeld.

According to the Pentagon, the aftermath of the war was supposed to be easy. No military police were sent in to stop postwar looting, which encouraged the rise of the insurgents. Pentagon officials talked about drawing down to 50,000 U.S. troops by fall of 2003.

No wonder no one paid attention to the reservists. They weren’t supposed to be on the front lines. The Pentagon never contemplated the prospect of an insurgency, in which the front lines are everywhere.

Even as the insurgency took root — in the fall of 2003 — Rumsfeld refused to admit the situation was urgent. As late as this month, he tried to blame the shortage of armored humvees on lack of production capacity.

Yet the manufacturers of humvees and armored plates for the U.S. military say they aren’t running near capacity. They say the Pentagon just hadn’t asked them to produce more.

Rumsfeld’s fierce resistance to admitting to problems has cost U.S. troops dearly. The cost is higher than U.S. (and Iraqi) lives lost.

The exit date of U.S. troops depends, as President Bush admits, on when Iraqi armed forces are capable of securing their country. Rumsfeld’s mismanagement ensures that date won’t come anytime soon.

In March, the secretary claimed that Iraq had 200,000 security forces “taking over responsibility for the country.” This puffed-up figure was meaningless; most were untrained police or security guards, not forces trained to fight insurgents.

That bogus number has shrunk. U.S. officials now talk of efforts to train 125,000 Iraqi forces to secure the country. But Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., just returned from a trip to Iraq, says, “We haven’t trained anywhere near that troop strength that can supplement U.S. troops.”

Only a handful of specialized Iraqi units are ready to handle insurgents. Biden says it will take one to two years more to get Iraqi forces into shape. President Bush admitted this week that the results of U.S. training efforts were “mixed, in terms of standing up Iraqi units who are willing to fight.”

Why such poor results? Again, responsibility lies with Rumsfeld.

For nearly a year after Baghdad’s fall, the Pentagon preferred to pursue its political vision of a new kind of Arab country without an army rather than equip Iraqis to fight their own bad guys.

Rumsfeld chose to disband the Iraqi army, instead of vetting and retraining some units. He nixed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s plan to bring back five Iraqi army divisions.

Not to mention the fact that Bush sent Bernard Kerik out to retrain Iraqi police in 2003, with miserable results.

Iraq’s security forces and our own have been bitterly served by these lapses. Isn’t it time that someone on high — rather than loyal reservists — is held responsible for the Pentagon’s mistakes?