Exit Rumsfeld

The second great piece of news of the day: Rumsfeld’s resignation.
Jeff Severns Guntzel of Electronic Iraq writes, quite correctly:

Rumsfeld is a symbol of failure in Iraq just as he is a symbol of a history of convenient relationships between the United States and the kinds of tyrants it often claims to deplore.
And Rumsfeld, the symbol, it must be remembered, is not the thing symbolized. The thing symbolized is arrogant imperial ambition and self-serving international actions. Those things are very much present in Washington whether Rumsfeld is there or not.

Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan makes this excellent point:

instead of admitting and reckoning with the fact that the war they advocated was a catastrophically bad idea, everyone from neocon hacks to flip-flopping Democrats, Bob Woodward (arch channeler of White House sources) and the self-styled “liberal hawks” of the chattering classes, like Peter Beinart and George Packer, have signed on to the notion that it was a good war, the right war, executed badly, because Rumsfeld adhered to some bizarre capital-intensive theory of warfare. In other words, if Rumsfeld had simply sent more troops, the outcome would have been different.
And that narrative, which the White House itself appears to have adopted in the wake of its midterm electoral drubbing, is a self-serving evasion. Indeed, the “blame Rumsfeld for Iraq” chorus reminds me of nothing as much as listening to Trotskyists trying to rescue Bolshevism by blaming its grotesque consequences on Stalin’s “implementation” rather than on its inner logic…

I agree with (what I think is) Tony’s point, that it was not the implementation of the war (by Rumsfeld) that was faulty but the decision to launch the war at all, in the first place.
However, I note that Rumsfeld did play a key role in making the invasion of Iraq seem logistically and politically do-able to the neophyte President back in late 2001. That was through his ardent advocacy of the “small swift force” approach– an approach that promised to “deliver” the overthrow of Saddam Hussein almost by stealth, in comparison with what an advocate of Colin Powell’s doctrine of amassing absolutely overwhelming military force before invading would have required.
The two men to whom Bush looked for complete guidance in these matters in late 2001 were the Secretary of Defense and the Vice-Prez. If they had told him that assembling a Powell-type heavy force was the only way to even try an invasion of Iraq it is much, much more likely that the Prez would have been deterred from trying, for these reasons:

Firstly, assembling such a force would have required much more and more explicit notification of, consultation with, and indeed the explicit permission of Congress. That would have involved having exactly the same kind of potentially bruising public debate over the war that Bush Sr. had in December 1990. That time, Bush Sr. just managed to win the war-enabling resolution But if Bush Jr. had tried to get the same kind of resolution authorizing the assembling and possible use of a large invasion force in 2002, he would have been far, far less likely to win that debate.
Secondly, assembling a Powell-type force in 2002 would clearly have been seen back then as constituting a massive diversion from the ongoing task in Afghanistan. As it was, Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to persuade Bush that the US military could do both… with the outcome we now see in both countries, these four years later….
Thirdly, assembling a Powell-type force would have required much more explicit permission from other governments. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, etc sort of turned a blind eye as Rumsfeld’s stealth force build-up gradually eased its way across their territories. But assembling a Powell-type force would have required winning the explicit approval of these governments, and therefore, most likely, also a UN resolution…

Therefore, while I agree with Tony Karon that the war was not totally “Rumsfeld’s fault”, still I think that by actively hawking and pursuing his long-held concept of the “light, fast forces” he played a crucial role making the invasion of Iraq possible at all…
Anyway, Rumsfeld is now gone. I’m assuming Gates is positioned to act as a “good manager” at the Pentagon. (Something Runsfeld notably was not.) Let’s hope Gates is also much more of a strategic realist than Rumsfeld was.
However, before anyone celebrates Rumsfeld’s departure too much we need to remember that Unca Dick is still sitting there in the Vice-Presidency– and quite unmovably so, absent some kind of dire medical emergency…