brainrow

In December 2004, when a national guardsman asked why the troops in Iraq were getting inadequate equipment, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

He said it as if it were a well-known military dictum — something famously said by Caesar or Napoleon or Rommel, perhaps — but it sounded a bit odd. What might have made some sense right after the shock of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 seemed like the wrong excuse, more than 20 months into a war against a country that hadn’t attacked us — a military conflict that we had “commenced at a time of our choosing.”

I was puzzled. Who was Rumsfeld referencing?

In his book Against All Enemies, former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke tells about a meeting the day after the terror attacks in Washington and New York:

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and “getting Iraq.” Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. “I thought I was missing something here,” I vented. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”

Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.”

Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq…

It occurs to me that maybe Clarke or somebody gave Rumsfeld some good advice:

You go to war with the enemy you have, not the enemy you might want or wish to have at a later time.

but Rumsfeld’s hearing aid was on the blink.

Yeah, maybe that’s the explanation.