Bush Replaces Rumsfeld with ... Another Rumsfeld

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2006.

Seven days after George W. Bush told reporters that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were "doing fantastic jobs" and would stay on until the end of his presidency, and one day after Americans gave an overwhelming vote of no confidence to the administration’s policies, Donald Rumsfeld answered calls from both Democrats and Republicans and resigned. (On Wednesday, Bush admitted he had lied to reporters because of political considerations.)

The move also came two days after an editorial ran in the Army-, Navy-, Air Force- and Marine Corps-Times newspapers calling for the secretary's head. "When the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary," the unusually blunt editorial argued, "then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

The administration hopes that the move will deflect criticism from its policies in Iraq, move the national discussion away from the Democrats' blowout in the midterms, blunt any investigative zeal that Democrats might feel in their new majority position and, possibly, lay a trap for Democrats going into the next election cycle.

It's unlikely to work. Without a fundamental change in policy, the departure of "Rummy" is a piece of political theater, a transparently meaningless gesture made in an attempt to mollify a restless public.

It's meaningless because while the administration may have abandoned the phrase "stay the course" during the lead-up to the midterms -- it polled badly -- Bush has made it clear that he will continue the bloody occupation of Iraq and leave the mess for the next president to try to clean up (what's less clear is whether either the Iraqis or his own party will allow him to do so).

The Wall Street Journal's John Harwood said yesterday that Rumsfeld's departure won't be enough to change Americans' increasingly negative view of Bush’s Iraq policy. "We have asked this question several times in our Journal/ NBC poll," he said on MSNBC, "and found it would be a symbolic gesture. Really, American people want to see results. They want to see casualties down ..."

According to former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, coauthor of the soon to be published book, "The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens," Rumsfeld was jettisoned primarily in an attempt to defuse increasing calls for investigation into the administration’s conduct of the Iraq war and occupation. "The president thinks that Rumsfeld is the bad public face of the Iraq war," she told me by phone on Wednesday. "In the wake of elections that were a huge repudiation of the administration's policies, I think it's clear that Americans are angry with the corruption, with the direction the administration has taken, with the arrogance, and they threw Rumsfeld to the wolves."

Holtzman cited a recent Newsweek Poll that found a majority of Americans want investigations into Iraq contracting and the way the country was led into the war to be a ”top priority” of the new Congress, and that a majority now favor calls for impeachment. She added: “I can’t say for sure what the president was thinking, but it’s possible that impeachment was explicitly on his mind.”

It's also possible that the administration cut Rumsfeld loose in favor of former CIA Director Robert Gates, Bush's nominee to replace him, with the specific intention of provoking a bruising confirmation hearing. That would allow the Republicans to reinforce two of their favorite narratives about Democrats: that they’re insufficiently belligerent to govern -- "soft on defense" -- and that Senate Democrats are "obstructionists," a key charge in the defeat of former Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004.

Because while it's possible that Bush thought the nomination of Bob Gates -- a longtime government official who's been through the confirmation process before -- would get a smooth sail through the Senate, the truth is that Gates will have a very hard time getting confirmed, and he should. The reason is simple and important to understand: Robert Gates is Donald Rumsfeld -- or at least a body double in experience, ideology and temperament.

Rumsfeld is a hawkish ideologue whose long career in government has been broken by dips into the private sector. He's known for his secrecy, his loyalty, his ability to win internal political fights and his eagerness to manipulate intelligence to support a desired policy objective. He has shown that he is not above breaking -- or at least stretching -- the law when he feels it's necessary to do so.

Gates has a remarkably similar profile. Like Rumsfeld, Gates served stints in the Nixon and Ford administrations -- he also advised Carter's hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski and served on Bush 41's National Security Council. After his nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was blocked by the Senate in 1987, Gates eventually got the job in 1991 under the first Bush. According to Thomas Powers, writing in 1996 in the New York Review of Books, Gates is an "unusual figure" -- the first director "to come out of the analytical side of the organization, which had been dominated for its first thirty years by the ethos of the covert operators of World War II."

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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