Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [247]
The Shinseki myth did harm to civilian-military relations. It became widely believed among the military’s active and retired communities, which came to resent the bad treatment I supposedly inflicted on a general officer. The myth also bolstered the allegation that I was intolerant of views that challenged my own and that I punished those who put them forward.
In fact, the opposite was the case. I welcomed and made a point of encouraging different views, dissent, and challenges. It was a constant refrain of mine at meetings that all proposals and plans are based on assumptions, that those assumptions should be spelled out clearly, examined skeptically, and reexamined routinely—and that applied also, indeed especially, to my own. Everyone makes errors in judgment, and the higher the official, the worse the consequences can be. So it was a principle with me that subordinates should speak up.
In 2002, for example, I sent a snowflake to a representative of the CIA who sat in on some of my Pentagon meetings:
When I told you I want you to speak up, I meant it. You know a whale of a lot about this subject, and every once in a while I see you in the back of the room looking reticent. That doesn’t help me at all! I need you to step up and say, “Have you thought about this?” or “What about that?” or “I think differently.” I am very comfortable with that. You may not want to do it to some of the other principals, but I am delighted to have you do it to me.35
As I believe in being challenged, I also made a practice of challenging my challengers. I wanted to make sure people disagreeing knew what they were talking about. When a challenger failed to support his views, I did not pretend to be impressed. But, in my view, no professional, let alone a three-or four-star military officer, should be intimidated into silence by a boss who asks questions and expects sensible answers, even honest answers as simple as an “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you.”
While the President and I had many discussions about the war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision. The President was the one charged with the tough choice to commit U.S. forces. I did not speculate on the thought process that brought him to his ultimate, necessarily lonely decision. We were all hearing the same things in briefing after briefing, and one NSC meeting after another, mulling over what we knew of the Iraqi regime and what the intelligence community believed about its capabilities and intentions. Though there were differences among us, they were not differences at the substantive or strategic levels of whether or not to allow Saddam Hussein’s regime to remain in power. Not one person in NSC meetings at which I was present stated or hinted that they were opposed to, or even hesitant, about the President’s decision. I took it that Bush assumed, as I did, that each of us had reached the same conclusion.
The process toward war had been incremental. Up until the very minute the President authorized the first strike, there was no moment when I felt with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided. Like the rest of us in the chain of command, Bush was reluctant to use force and invite the serious challenges it entailed. This came through in his dogged attempts to bring the UN onboard to enforce their own sanctions and his ongoing diplomatic initiatives to stave off armed conflict. It seemed to me Bush was balancing a growing imperative to take military action and a natural reluctance to commit American troops and our nation to such a struggle.
Wars, it has been correctly said, are failures of diplomacy. And in the run-up to the war with Iraq, institutions, nations, and individuals failed. The United Nations failed to live up to its charter by not enforcing its resolutions. France,