Kicking a man when he’s down

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost.

But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.

Donald Rumsfeld, the now disgraced former Secretary of Defense of the United States, was as credulous a believer in the miraculous powers of technology as any devotee of the healing cult of a saint’s relics. He combined this credulity with a lack of understanding of the inherent limitations of power, however great. The weakest person, thank goodness, can subvert the intentions and purposes of the most powerful. Power affects: it does not determine.

This book is a relentlessly hostile account of the man and his career. Such hostility on the part of an author towards his subject is inclined to produce a protective reaction in the reader: for the boot being so firmly on the author’s foot, the reader wants to protect the subject from the kicking he receives. Rumsfeld’s arrogance, however, does not encourage such protectiveness. Physiognomy, no doubt, is an inexact science, but his face does not invite compassion.

Having been both the youngest and the oldest Secretary of Defense in his country’s history, it is only to be expected that he is a highly intelligent man.