Frum: GOP Reckoning Needed

David Frum responds to Robert Draper's piece in GQ on Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on New Majority.

Conservatives should be focused instead on a very different question – an unpleasant one, but one absolutely essential to our indispensable, inevitable but still postponed reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration. The question is: Why did Iraq go so very badly wrong – and why, having gone wrong, did it take so ruinously long for the administration to shift to a more successful course? Conservatives rightly take pride and comfort in the achievements of the surge. But the surge does not banish all the antecedent questions about Iraq. The surge may have rescued the American position in Iraq from total disaster, but nobody would describe the present situation in Iraq as anything like satisfactory.

Henry Kissinger once described Rumsfeld as the most ferocious bureaucratic adversary he ever encountered. And unfortunately one of the characteristic vices of bureaucracies is to carry on bureaucratic warfare long after the issues at stake have been forgotten - indeed even to the detriment of what is supposedly the bureaucracy's own core mission...The record of the Rumsfeld years remains one of the highest obstacles to a Republican recovery. It's hard to imagine how we can achieve that recovery without coming to some kind of reckoning with this record - even if only an inward, private reckoning that will enable us to avoid such mistakes in future. But you cannot reckon with what you won't recognize.

The issue highlighted by Frum is a challenge all administrations face: the difficulty of keeping a number of high-powered Cabinet egos from getting distracted by turf wars from their specific tasks and the administration's overall goals. Just as a historically powerful Vice-President like Cheney required a relatively passive, naive President like Bush, so did a vicious bureaucratic warrior like Rumsfeld. Frum's point seems to be that the chaos and incompetence of the Bush administration was the result of Cheney and Rumsfeld being allowed to run amok.

--Ballard Burgher