Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [245]
The day the story appeared I called each of them on the phone, reaching Jones first. “General Jones,” I said, after referencing the Post article, “you have had every opportunity to talk and you haven’t.”
“You’re right,” Jones responded.28 A seasoned insider known for his skill in navigating the Washington political scene, Jones knew well the effect of appearing in the press criticizing a war plan, particularly when he hadn’t raised a single criticism of it on the inside. He said it wouldn’t happen again. He told me explicitly that he wanted me to know he was “on board with the plan.” To my knowledge, Jones never corrected the record with the Washington Post.
Though Jones seemed to take responsibility for the remarks attributed to him, Shinseki was a different matter. When I raised the article with him, he indicated that the story was not true, and that he had not expressed doubts to anyone.
“Who do you believe?” Shinseki asked. “The Washington Post or me?”29
When he put it that way, I was not inclined to believe a press report over what a four-star general said to me personally. Even though Shinseki was adamant that the Post had the story wrong, no correction from Shinseki found its way into the paper either.
The incident reveals much about how Washington works. Neither general was directly quoted in the story saying he was skeptical, yet on the front page of the Washington Post they were so portrayed. Each denied the central element of the story. Still, the story ran, was never corrected or retracted, and as a result, Shinseki and Jones gained reputations as war skeptics and heroes to war critics. I respect both Shinseki and Jones for their service to our country, but I cannot explain their failure to correct the public record.*
Six weeks after the article appeared, President Bush invited the senior military officials to the White House to give them still another opportunity to review and offer their comments on the war plan. I accompanied the combatant commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the cabinet room on January 30, 2003. Once we were gathered, the President went around the long table. Looking each of them squarely in the eye, Bush asked the four-star officers in uniform, one at a time, to offer their views and to raise any questions or issues they might have. This was one more chance for the most senior officers of the United States military to express any reservations they might have directly to the President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Franks—the responsible combatant commander—and me. No one in the room—not General Shinseki, not General Jones, nor anyone else—raised an objection. These were all decorated, experienced senior officers, not wilting wallflowers. I assumed and expected that they would speak up if they had reservations—indeed, it was their duty to do so. They did not.
It was not long before Shinseki, I believe unintentionally, would again be catapulted into the public spotlight. That February, after having been called to testify to Congress about the impending war, the soft-spoken general became one of the most famous members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent history—a poster child, even a martyr, for opponents of the war.
The popular version of the General’s now famous February 2003 testimony is that Shinseki testified to members of Congress that far more troops would be needed in Iraq than were provided for in the war plan. Because he had supposedly spoken truth to power, the New York Times claimed he was later “vilified, then marginalized” by members of the Bush administration,