The case against the secretary of defense goes beyond the events in the prison. For those, he has already apologized. But there was a sense there of a man apologizing because the tables of organization list him as the man in charge, a little like the mayor of San Francisco apologizing for the earthquake. Not yet explained is how it is that Donald Rumsfeld, looking at the report in March describing the behavior of the prison guards, did nothing more than merely approve their prosecution. Clearly what cried out to be done was a public repudiation of the misbehavior combined with the public exposure of it.
No doubt Mr. Rumsfeld acted entirely on military considerations. The scene in Iraq had got bad, in March, and he was surely motivated by the temptation to think of anything other than the containment of the terrorists as clerical in nature. But of course he was wrong, and his misjudgment is paradoxically hitting him the hardest.
While Rumsfeld might reasonably have thought the prison doings trivial in the context of a war in which 135,000 American soldiers were engaged, some being killed every day, the public has been seized by the hideous detail, seeing it as a sore that suddenly illuminates the disease coursing through the whole system. Abu Ghraib is causing some people to say: What in the hell were American soldiers doing in that grisly place? With those grisly people? While some of their companions were being ambushed and shot every day. Oh! And by the way, they are asking for billions of dollars more to pursue that nightmare.
Not lucid thought, granted. If we had applied the same reasoning to incidents in the Pacific 60 years ago, we'd have declared the war diseased and unjustified, and fired Douglas MacArthur for losing the Philippines. History teaches us that the firing of a general, when wars go badly, is a pretty routine thing. President Lincoln fired Gen. George B. McClellan, who then proceeded to nomination for president by the Democratic Party in 1864. Japanese culture made way for failed generals to disembowel themselves in propitiation.
President Bush is understandably determined not to let Abu Ghraib dictate the course of our entire Mideast enterprise. But he may not succeed, and Donald Rumsfeld may be giving thought to whether his continued service is a strategic mistake.