WORLD STAKES POKER
I was listening to IMus on Thursday morningdriving back from JFK airport. He had on one of the Time or Newsweek correspondents and they were discussing the conventional wisdom that Rumsfeld blew it going into Iraq with two few soldiers. The Rumsfeld small army doctrine replaced the Powell Doctrine of overwhelmong force from Gulf War I This led into a discussion of Rumsfeld as a weird unfathomable character reminiscent of Jack Nicholson. It dawned me that Rumsfeld is a great poker player and that is what you need in a Secretary of War. He is deliberately scary, unpredictable and unpenetrable and we are lucky he is on our side.
Look at it this way. After 911 we discovered we were playing in a high stakes game and we needed to weed out some of nthe other players. During the Clinton era, the US had taken a break from international activism and cut the size of the military. Bush thought he was playing a strong hand because the whole UN agreed that Saddam was threat because of his support of terrorism and his weapons of mass destruction programs. Clearly allowing states like Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and North Korea to shelter and feed terrorists for years was a mistake withy grave consequences. Bush thought that he had the UN with him and he knew he was going to have take more down than just the Taliban in Irak to let the world know that the US was no longer a paper tiger but a credible threat to those who would harbor our enemies.
America was skating on very thin ice. Economically we were on the ropes, facing the possibility of not just a recession but a great depression. To many the idea of the axis of evil sounded ludicrous, but think back to the 1930s. Germany, Italy Japan and the Soviet Union did not have all that much in common culturally , ethnically or idelogically. Together they though they could upset the worlld balance of power to their advantage. Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea together could start some real trouble and who is to say what side China and Russia would come in on if the outcome was in doubt. The whole Samuel Huntington was on the table.
The Free World had to make a stand, not just talk tough but back it up. Europe supported us in the tough talk, but when Sadam called our bluff, Old Europe folded and we were left with just the Brits primarily. All of a sudden our cards did not look so good any more, but we still had a winning hand and we had a big pot to protect so Rumsfeld had to play it out. The only play was the small army, because we do not have a big army. If we pulled the troops out of Saudia Arabia, S Korea, Germany, Kosovo etc we would invite an attack from the other axis of evil countries. Of course it would have been great to attack with the Powell Doctrine Big Army. We don't have one. We have a very good little army.We had a geat battle plan. Enough to win the hand.
We had to disband the Iraqi army. They were a big army that outnumbered us. Well fed and well equipped they could cause us some real problems, more problems than the guerilla remnant we are facing today.
