How did we get into this war?

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld replaced General Shinseki with a Special Forces man who had already retired, General Peter J. Schoomaker. This was an affront to many leaders in the army who saw many highly capable contenders for the job already serving and not yet retired. The buzz among army personnel in the Pentagon was “Rumsfeld has rejected all of us”.

Bill Gertz, the national security reporter of the Washington Times, recorded the nomination of Shinseki this way:

The choice of Gen. Schoomaker is seen as part of Mr Rumsfeld's effort to reshape the service from a structure of large, heavily armored divisions into a more agile force modeled on Special Forces commandos, who played key roles in recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld hopes the smaller units also can move around the world quickly and easily. The pick is viewed as a slap at the current roster of army four-star and three-star generals vying for the service's top post, because defense secretaries do not usually reach outside the ranks of current active-duty officers to pick a chief of staff.

To make the affront worse, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld sent his regrets when invited to the retirement ceremony of General Shinseki. A retirement ceremony of a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is normally a command performance for the SecDef and even the president. Rumsfeld had signalled again that he would not tolerate any dissention on his plan for a smaller army.

General Shinseki had made his views known on the plan to invade Iraq. He thought the plan just had too few troops to ensure security once the fighting ended. His uneasiness spilled into the media: enraging Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other civilian leaders devoted to Mr Rumsfeld.

All this shows the strain in the Pentagon in the run up to the war to depose Saddam. Secretary Rumsfeld said again and again he was pushing for new thinking: and one of the things lost while thinking new thoughts was the Powell Doctrine.

It is easy to become a back seat driver or an armchair quarterback, so I will not elaborate further. But if reasonable people look at the questions of the Powell Doctrine and ask themselves how these questions might have been answered before the invasion of Iraq, many will conclude that there were troubling signs of failure even before the military action commenced.

And why didn’t General Colin Powell himself insist upon strict adherence to the Powell Doctrine before the war?

Because protocol limited his ability to dissent. Powell had retired from the military and was now the secretary of state. In the normal business of the US Government, he was encouraged not to meddle in the affairs of the Pentagon.

Furthermore, two very strong personalities, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, stood squarely and firmly in Powell’s way. Combined with CIA director Tenet saying, in the presence of the president and the other key leaders, that the evolution was a slam dunk, Powell certainly felt that there was a consensus to go to war with or without him.