Rumsfeld’s exit greased by GOP electoral skid

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

NEW YORK - Tuesday’s elections were a rout, a massacre, a bloody, appalling debacle for Republicans.

And voters, the majority of whom according to exit polls were deeply troubled by President Bush’s entanglement in Iraq, seemed to get quick action: Bush announced just 11 hours after the polls closed that Donald Rumsfeld was resigning as defense secretary.

There’s no precise parallel in the history of changing a defense secretary in wartime.

In September 1950 President Harry Truman ousted Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, after military reversals in the Korean War which had begun in June. The firing took place two months before the 1950 elections in which Truman's Democratic party lost 28 House seats.

In December 1993 President Clinton ousted Defense Secretary Les Aspin after the "Black Hawk Down" losses in Somalia.

Bush is making his change the very day after an election calamity; when President Lyndon Johnson ousted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on Nov. 29, 1967, it was a year after Johnson’s party suffered serious losses in the 1966 midterm elections.

LBJ was eyeing the 1968 presidential election; and only decided months after sacking McNamara that he’d not run in 1968.

Bush can’t run again; he can only hope to manage the Iraq operation to some semblance of success that won’t hurt his party’s presidential nominee in 2008.

The front-runner for that nomination, Sen. John McCain, has been an articulate supporter of the U.S. commitment to bring stability to Iraq, as well as a fierce critic of Rumsfeld’s conduct of the war.  McCain said shortly before the election that 20,000 more troops were needed in Iraq.

Spectacular, yes, but substantive?
Bush’s replacement of Rumsfeld is a spectacular personnel change which might marginally improve his relations with House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and the newly emboldened Democrats.

It does remove a man Democrats (and some Republicans) regarded as an noisome irritant, since as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Wednesday, Rumsfeld was notorious among his adversaries for being “stubborn and arrogant. He did not listen. He did not change course when it was apparent that a new path was needed.” 

But a “new path,” a substantial change in policy has yet to be seen – and may not be possible, given Bush’s unchanged commitment to victory in Iraq.

Bush said at his Tuesday press briefing: “I am making a change at the secretary of defense to bring a fresh perspective as to how to achieve something I think most Americans want, which is a victory….”

He said later at the press briefing, “It’s very important that people understand the consequences of failure….. We’re not going to fail; we’re not going to leave before the job is done.”

He added that if the Democrats’ goal is “success, then we can work together.”

There remains the impasse: even conservative Republicans such as Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R- Minn. who lost his seat Tuesday partly due to the war, acknowledge that Americans do not have the skills or inclination to be neo-colonial custodians of a bitterly ethnically divided place such as Iraq.

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