Publication of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, “Known and Unknown,” has renewed the fierce debate about the most controversial secretary of defense since Robert McNamara. Most of the debate centers around what many see as mistakes and misjudgments on Rumsfeld’s watch from 2001 to 2006: the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction which didn’t exist, for example. People ask why it took so long to win in Iraq and why we still haven’t won in Afghanistan.
Yet, with all the criticisms flying thick and fast, not enough attention gets focused on what Rumsfeld did right during the momentous half-decade after
9/11, and how his legacy has made America and the world a safer place — indeed, keeps us safe still, under President Obama.
Rumsfeld was sitting in his office on Sept. 11, 2001, when a terrorist-controlled airliner smashed into the Pentagon, killing 189 people in the second leg of the 9/11 attack. If the plane had struck the other side close to the building’s river entrance, the secretary of defense would almost certainly have been among the dead.
Even as the flames were being put out, Rumsfeld made it the Pentagon’s top priority to ensure no such attack on Americans happened again. It is easy today to forget there was no clear road map on how to accomplish this.
Some decisions, like pursuing WMDs in Iraq, proved missteps. But three others have had major benefits for our national security to this day.
The first was making Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars dream of missile defense a reality — not as a shield against Soviet attack, but against missiles launched by a rogue nation or terrorist group. Starting in 2001, Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush restored the money the Clinton administration had slashed from the Missile Defense Agency as missile-shootdown tests resumed in earnest.
A landmark was passed on Feb. 24, 2005, when a Raytheon-produced interceptor blew a mock enemy missile out of the sky. Three years later, the MDA successfully shot down a malfunctioning US spy satellite. Everyone now agrees Stars Wars is here to stay as a tool in the War on Terror.
The second was authorizing the creation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, to house the hundreds of terrorists captured in the wake of the Afghan invasion. For five years, critics screamed that Gitmo was a chamber of horrors like Abu Ghraib (the abuses of which Rumsfeld discovered long before the media did; he ordered the prison closed and the perpetrators punished). When he left office in November 2006, groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seriously argued he should be charged with war crimes.
Instead, Gitmo has proved to be a sane and orderly detention center, where world’s most dangerous terrorists can be held and interrogated without fundamental rights being violated, with neither national security nor public serenity being threatened. Even President Obama has been forced to confront the fact that Gitmo is a vital part of our ongoing War on Terror, and has had to renege on his repeated promises to shut it down.
Nor has Obama been shy about adopting Rumsfeld’s third invaluable addition to our national-security arsenal, the Predator drone.
Before 2001, unmanned-aerial vehicles — UAVs — existed largely as lab experiments. Rumsfeld pushed his men in uniform and the CIA to use them effectively in the field, both for gathering intelligence (with stunning success in Afghanistan) and then for laying out the bad guys with Hellfire-armed Predators. Now they’re invaluable to our military — and have become Obama’s instrument of choice in the War on Terror. As with Gitmo, the debt to Rumsfeld goes unacknowledged.
Of course, shadows hover over other parts of Rumsfeld’s legacy.
He and the Bush administration spent 10 years pumping billions into a pre-9/11 American military that President Bill Clinton had put on a starvation diet. Too much of that money had to be spent fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not enough for muscling up for the future.
The peace that took too long to win in Iraq remains fragile. The war in Afghanistan, thought all but won in 2002, is still going on eight years later.
Certainly many have died — Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, and others. But many more live free.
While the debate rages, the Rumsfeld legacy lives on. On balance, we can be thankful for it.
Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the Arsenal of Democracy.