George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld

George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld
The former president's secret campaign to oust the secretary of defense was rebuffed by President Bush, a source says.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Pages 1 2
Photos by AP/Wide World

From left: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush

June 8, 2006 Former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president's effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain," he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.

The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. The current president had previously rejected entreaties from party establishment figures to revamp his administration with new appointments. There was no one left to approach him except his father. This effort to pluck George W. from his troubles is the latest episode in a recurrent drama -- from the drunken young man challenging his father to go "mano a mano," to the father pulling strings to get the son into the Texas Air National Guard and helping salvage his finances from George W.'s mismanagement of Harken Energy. For the father, parental responsibility never ends. But for the son, rebellion continues. When journalist Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

The former president, a practitioner of foreign policy realism, was intruding on the president's parallel reality. But the realist was trying to shake the fantasist in vain. "The president believes the talking points he's given and repeats on progress in Iraq," a Bush administration national security official told me. Bush redoubles his efforts, projects his firmness, in the conviction that the critics lack his deeper understanding of Iraq that allows him to see through the fog of war to the Green Zone as a city on a hill.

Just as his father cannot break Bush's enchantment with "victory," so the revelation of the Haditha massacre does not cause him to change his policy. For him, the alleged incident is solely about the individual Marines involved; military justice will deal with them. It's as though the horrific event had nothing to do with the war. Haditha, too, exists in a bubble.

Before the Iraq war, the administration received and dismissed warnings of the dangers of a prolonged occupation from the State Department, the CIA and the military. A month before the invasion, in February 2003, the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute published a paper by a team of its experts, "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario." Civil war, sectarian militias, anarchy, suicide bombers and widespread insurgency -- if there was a lengthy occupation -- were predicted: "Ethnic, tribal, and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed ... The longer a U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, the more danger exists that elements of the Iraqi population will become impatient and take violent measures to hasten the departure of U.S. forces." But the Bush administration simply ignored this cautionary analysis. Among the report's cogent warnings was that insurgents could incite violence to provoke repression, forcing U.S. troops into an uncontrollable "action-reaction cycle." Nearly three years after the invasion, the Marines in Haditha were apparently caught up in that whirlwind.


On Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb blew up an armored vehicle of Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, patrolling in the upper Euphrates Valley, and Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas was killed. For hours afterward, members of the unit apparently murdered 24 civilians, including women, children and old people, in cold blood. Kilo Company was on its third tour of duty and had engaged in the battle of Fallujah, in which the city of 300,000, held by insurgents, was leveled.

The coverup at Haditha reportedly began instantly. However, an Iraqi journalism student shot a video the day after of the bloodstained and bullet-riddled houses where the massacre had occurred. That video made its way to an Iraqi human rights group and finally to a correspondent from Time magazine. When Time made its first queries, the Marine spokesman, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, who had issued the first statement on Haditha as an action against terrorists months earlier, told reporters that they were falling for al-Qaida propaganda. "I cannot believe you're buying any of this," he wrote in an e-mail. Nonetheless, word reached Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq, that there had been no investigation and he ordered one immediately.

Chiarelli, as Thomas E. Ricks reported in the Washington Post, "is an unusual general in today's Army, with none of the 'good old boy' persona seen in many other top commanders. He had praised an article by a British officer that was sharply critical of U.S. officers in Iraq for using tactics that alienated the population. He wanted U.S. forces to operate differently than they had been doing."