Philip Sherwell
London Telegraph
Sunday, November 12, 2006

If you want to win, sack Donald Rumsfeld, the President was urged by his top aides. But George Bush stubbornly refused to ditch his Defence Secretary before the election – even though he had already lined up a successor

When President George W Bush took a respite from the hassles of the campaign trail at his beloved ranch in Crawford, Texas, last weekend, he told supporters how much he was looking forward to celebrating the 60th birthday of his wife Laura on Saturday evening.

But the commander-in-chief also had some clandestine business lined up the next day at the "Western White House". For on Sunday he met there in secret with Robert Gates to finalise plans for the man who served as CIA director under his father, President George H W Bush, to replace Donald Rumsfeld as US Defence Secretary.

The cloak-and-dagger arrangements for the rendezvous were fitting for an erstwhile spy chief. Visitors to Crawford are normally driven to the ranch from nearby Waco, but that town is also the base for the presidential press corps and White House aides during Mr Bush's Texan sojourns.

So on Sunday, two trusted officials were dispatched to collect Mr Gates from the neighbouring town of McGregor instead and spirit him on to the ranch, away from prying eyes. The mission was a resounding success: news of Mr Rumsfeld's ousting remained a closely guarded secret until just before Mr Bush made the announcement in an East Wing press conference on Wednesday lunchtime, after the Democrats reclaimed Congress.

The changing of the guard at the Pentagon sent shock waves from the Washington Beltway to Baghdad's Green Zone, and carried more than a hint of a Shakespearean dynastical saga, as Mr Bush turned to his father's allies for help in a crisis. Faced by the setbacks in Iraq, and with Iran and North Korea refusing to abandon their nuclear programmes, the President has replaced the neoconservative ideologues who dominated his first term with pragmatic "wise old men" from the previous Bush Administration.

advertisementMr Gates, 63, who left the CIA for academia in 1993 and is currently president of Texas A&M University, has a reputation for consensus-building that contrasts dramatically with his predecessor's acerbic management style. Mr Gates is already involved in reassessing Iraq policy as a member of the Iraq Study Group, a panel of Republican and Democrat foreign policy grandees set up by Mr Bush, which is headed by his father's former Secretary of State, James Baker. The experience is said by friends to have left him "dismayed" and "distraught" at US operations there.

As the fall-out continues from last week's elections in Washington, The Sunday Telegraph can today report the inside story of how Mr Bush, who is famously loyal to his inner circle, finally ditched the man whose steely features had become the unpopular American face of the Iraq war.

Mr Rumsfeld, who first offered his resignation after the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal broke in 2004, had been looking for the chance to leave the Administration for more than a year, but was determined to depart at a positive time for developments in Iraq, this newspaper has learnt. That time never came, and instead he was effectively sacked last week, as American public support for the war slid and casualties mounted. "It was Rumsfeld's nightmare to leave at a time like this," said a Pentagon adviser.

Mr Bush reluctantly started to contemplate replacing one of the Iraq war's chief architects last summer, as intelligence reports landed on his desk in the Oval Office predicting a major escalation in the insurgency and making it clear that US tactics had little prospect of success.

His former chief of staff, Andrew Card, had twice suggested that he sack Mr Rumsfeld, to no avail. But in June, in a key shift within the Administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded the President that he should at least consider replacing his Defence Secretary.

By early September, Mr Bush was discussing a Rumsfeld resignation and possible replacement with his closest advisers. News of this reached the Pentagon chief and a month ago the two men began a series of meetings, during which Mr Rumsfeld also acknowledged that it was time to go, according to a senior Pentagon source.

Mr Rumsfeld offered to resign before the election but the President rejected the idea, saying that it looked like a crude political ploy. Indeed, he told journalists a few days before the election that Mr Rumsfeld was safe in his job, a statement he has since acknowledged was not true. The Sunday Telegraph has also learnt that when Mr Bush first considered possible replacements for the Defence Secretary, he put out feelers to Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Senator who lost the nomination of his state Democrat party over his support for the Iraq war. But Mr Lieberman, who ran as an independent and beat the Democrat candidate on Tuesday, turned down the offer, so attention turned to Mr Gates.

Mr Rumsfeld officially tendered his resignation on Tuesday, as Americans turned their backs on Mr Bush's Republicans and voted the Democrats back to power in both the House of Representatives and the Senate – a seismic change to the country's body politic, or a "thumping" in Mr Bush's own words. So unexpected was his exit that senior military officers based at the Pentagon were told the news in phone calls from reporters.

"At no time was there a falling-out between Rumsfeld and Bush. Everything was done in a very amicable way and they remain friends. By the end, Rumsfeld did not fight to keep his job. He was ready to go," said a former senior military officer who is now a Pentagon contractor. Mr Rumsfeld is 74, has been in office for almost six years, oversaw the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as an overhaul of the armed forces, and had no desire to undergo the indignities of grillings on the Hill if the Democrats won power.

In her first press conference as the Democrat House Speaker-in-waiting on Wednesday morning, Nancy Pelosi called for Mr Rumsfeld's head, unaware that it had already been delivered. Her demand for Rumsfeld to go had been a consistent theme of the Democrats' election campaign, although party strategists have since acknowledged that they were keeping their fingers crossed that the Pentagon chief would remain in office to boost their vote at the ballot box.

Indeed, with a cohesion more typical of their Republican rivals, the Democrats stuck to an electoral strategy in which the Iraq war was a a crucial vote-winner. "Iraq was the driving force behind everything. And October [in Iraq] was a disastrous month," said Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton White House aide and Illinois Congressman who masterminded his party's campaign in the House.

While most Republican candidates were doing their best to avoid uttering the "I" word, Mr Emanuel and his counterpart in the Senate, Charles Schumer, steadfastly rode the wave of Iraq fatigue to victory (helped along by a series of Republican corruption and sex scandals). To their relief, Mr Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also kept the focus on Iraq, insisting that "victory" was still possible. Indeed, just four days before the election, in a memorable soundbite, Mr Cheney insisted that US policy would remain "full steam ahead", whatever the result. "Thank you, Lord," Howard Wolfson, a senior Democrat consultant and close friend of the Clintons, recalls thinking at the time.

The iron discipline and focus with which Emanuel ran the House campaign impressed even his rivals. "I'm going to call Rahm, the guy did a good job," Mr Bush told aides gathered for a dawn meeting on Wednesday morning. And by Thursday afternoon, the Democrats had also secured control of the Senate after Jim Webb was confirmed as the victor in Virginia by just 7,000 votes. That dramatic contest had illustrated the central role of Iraq: Mr Webb is a decorated former Marine and Republican Navy Secretary who has a son serving in Iraq and wore combat boots throughout the campaign. But he had turned against the Bush Administration over its handling of the war.

As Republican aides on Capitol Hill prepared to look for new jobs when Congress reconvenes in January, there was bitterness among many operatives that Mr Bush waited until the day after the vote to replace his Pentagon chief. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who led the 1994 Republican clean sweep that was overturned on Tuesday, captured the angry mood, saying: "If the President had replaced Rumsfeld two weeks ago, the Republicans would still control the Senate and they would probably have 10 more House members. For the President to have suggested for the last two weeks that there would be no change and then to change the day after the election is very disheartening."

Mr Bush had, however, insisted he would not play electoral politics with such a key post. He also warned America's terrorist enemies not to celebrate, although Mr Rumsfeld's exit was greeted with predictable gloating in a videotape released on Friday and purportedly recorded by the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Rounding off a bad week, the outgoing Pentagon chief also learnt that he could face prosecution in Germany for his alleged role in abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

The focus for the rest of the world switches now to the meaning of this upheaval for US policy in Iraq and other international hotspots. For a start, Mr Gates and his friend Mr Baker, a Bush family consigliere who is now playing a key advisory role, are old-style "realists" who believe that the US should be negotiating about Iraq with supposed enemies such as Iran and Syria. Mr Bush also meets regularly with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another old-time deal-cutting pragmatist, according to a recent book by Bob Woodward.

Neocon warriors have lined up to express their alarm that Mr Rumsfeld has been replaced by a long-time CIA official who has spoken out in support of dialogue with Iran. True believers close to Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney view the country's premier spy agency as a hotbed of anti-Administration troublemakers and see no point in talks with foes such as Teheran and Damascus while they are fomenting unrest inside Iraq. "That is tantamount to surrender and will ultimately have the result of surrender," said Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan defence official.

Dan Goure, a Pentagon adviser, said the reaction at the defence department to the new nominee was "one of puzzlement at best". He added: "They are not sure what a man who's been out of the game since 1993 brings with him." There is no love lost on either side. Friends of Mr Gates described him as being "clearly distraught over the incompetence of how the Iraq operation had been run" after he recently visited Baghdad. He expressed disbelief that Mr Rumsfeld did not react more rapidly to the dramatic slide in security after the war.

"He's an open critic of Rumsfeld's style and record," Vincent Cannastraro, a former CIA counter-terrorist chief who worked for Mr Gates, told The Sunday Telegraph. Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy for the elder Bush, praised the change in tack. "Bob Gates comes from the realist school of how to operate internationally," Ross said. "As such, it is pretty clear the neoconservative agenda on regime change and democracy promotion will take a back seat to stability and less pressure on regimes to open up their political systems."

The Iraq Study Group is expected to deliver its preliminary findings next month. The bipartisan panel has been charged with looking at all options, from increasing US troop levels to get the job done, as Sen John McCain recommends, to a rapid pull-out. In practice, it is expected to outline a series of specific security goals for a phased wind-down of US forces.

As the recriminations continued, there was a reminder of how fickle a town Washington can be at the Ritz-Carlton hotel where the resident "mixologists", as cocktail-makers are known in the swankier establishments nowadays, have unveiled their latest creation, the "Rum Rummy Rum". Laced with a heady three ounces of rum and one of Grand Marnier, topped off with sour mix and ginger ale, it is described as a "dangerous brew of optimism and defiance with wicked hangover potential".

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