Speak Up, Mr. Rumsfeld

Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page B06

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald H. Rumsfeld asked some tough and smart questions of his top aides in the private memo that was leaked to the press last week. At the end of his missive, he told his deputies to prepare to discuss them at an upcoming meeting. Knowing Mr. Rumsfeld's reputation as a demanding boss, we cannot help wondering how he would react if his aides served up the responses he himself has provided to Congress and the media. For example, Mr. Rumsfeld's memo argues that "we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror" and asks whether a new organization, new tactics or another presidential mandate to the intelligence community is needed. What if the answer he received was: "One could make the case that what we're doing is exactly the right thing," as Mr. Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year? Or what if, in response to his assertion that "we are having mixed results with al Qaeda," Mr. Rumsfeld's aides responded that, to the contrary, "we're finding the terrorists where they are, and we're rooting them out, and we're capturing them, we're killing them." That is what Mr. Rumsfeld said Thursday when reporters asked him about his own memo.

Surely no one who served up such thin gruel would survive long in Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Which raises the question: Why does the secretary think that is the appropriate way for him to talk to Congress and the country? For months, as security conditions have worsened in Afghanistan and as U.S. troops have fought a costly war against a stubborn resistance in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld's habit has been to insist in public that "the progress has been quite good," that "it's gotten better every week" and that nothing has happened that has surprised him or was not anticipated in the Pentagon's prewar planning. The stonewalling has cost him much goodwill in Congress, with even Republican committee chairmen chafing over the defense secretary's refusal to talk straight. More seriously, it risks having exactly the opposite effect from what might be intended: Faced with the gap between Mr. Rumsfeld's words and the obvious troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the public may conclude that the Bush administration has either lost touch with reality or has no clear sense of how to respond to the challenges it faces.