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I decided to take a break from a seemingly endless web site redesign by categorizing some hundreds of posts I wrote before the site had categories (something I’ve now abandoned in favor of writing this), and ran across one about Don Rumsfeld’s somewhat mystic approach to the War on Terra^®. The subject was a briefly infamous memo in which Rumsfeld acknowledged that contrary to public declarations at the time, he, and presumably the administration, lacked the ability to either quantify success in The Long War or level with the public about it.

The wayback machines for our expedition into history are columns by Slate’s Fred Kaplan and Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift from October of 2003. Along the way we’ll stop in for a cuppa with our auld friend William “Jerry” Boykin — no relation to L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, or Tom and “Jerry” — the then and current Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, best known for trotting around the country in uniform and telling church audiences that Islam is evil.

Although the whole memo is worth reading, most of what attention it received was focused on this excerpt:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions.

Loosely translated, that means “We don’t have much of a plan and even if we did, we have no way of knowing whether it’s working or not.” Little has changed since then except that now we do have metrics and we know the “plan,” whether still imaginary or not, isn’t working especially well.

Kaplan’s reaction to what he said might be “the most important, even stunning official document yet to come out of this war” was focused on the chasm between the administration’s public statements and Rumsfeld’s more candid assessments and on the planning deficit.

Have you ever read a more pathetic federal document in your life? What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We’ll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it’s “pretty clear” we “can win” it, “in one way or another” after “a long, hard slog”), but we’re losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don’t know how to measure winning or losing, we don’t have a plan for winning it, we don’t know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.

[…]

What makes the Rumsfeld memo a major document, however, is that it confirms much of the news reporting coming out of Iraq—the same reporting that Bush officials (including Rumsfeld) have publicly derided as biased. NPR’s Deborah Amos reported Wednesday morning that Donald Evans, Bush’s secretary of commerce, came to Baghdad recently and admonished the American reporters there to start paying more attention to the good news about the occupation. “The American people have a far different view from the reality that we all know is here,” Amos quoted Evans as saying, “You should report what we’re really seeing.” How long had Evans been in Iraq? About 24 hours. Where did he sleep that night? In Kuwait.

Rumsfeld’s memo makes plain that our top officials suffer no illusions about the war. They are trying only to sell illusions to the rest of us. The leaking of Rumsfeld’s memo puts a tailspin on the sales pitch.

That tail has been spinning for quite some while now, but Kaplan’s astonishment at the time is understandable given the close proximity of the memo and VI Day.

Clift, writing the day after Kaplan, described the memo as “refreshing,” reiterated Kaplan’s concerns and added a bit of local color.

Rummy’s revelations are exquisitely timed. Just as Bush is complaining about the national press “filter,†along comes Mr. Filter himself with a sour assessment of the administration’s success in combating terrorism. This is classic Washington. You have to read the entrails. Did Rumsfeld intentionally leak this memo? Was he getting back at the White House for that little reorganization deal they pulled a few weeks ago that seemed to move him aside to make room at the top for Condoleezza Rice?

It’s hard to believe that Rumsfeld would go to these lengths to strike a bureaucratic blow at the White House. “He laid a giant turd on the front doorstep of all the happy talk,†says a Senate Republican aide. If Rumsfeld didn’t intend for this memo to get out, then it was a “revenge of the toes,†the aide speculates. “He stepped on so many toes that this was somebody’s way of getting back at him.â€

Apparently not much has changed in that regard either. Land sharks bearing turd-grams still abound, and to as little immediate practical effect now as then.

I’ll be dropping a note to Eric Brewer, our White House writer, to suggest a question for Tony Snow:

In October of 2003, Don Rumsfeld asked his top aides to consider whether the US needed “a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists.” Can you tell us whether the administration decided we do need that long-range plan and if so, what the elements of it are and whether it’s working?

If anyone has suggestions for other memo-related questions to Snow, or for that matter on any other subject, please drop them off in our “Ask The White House” section.

Lest we forget, here’s Clift on Boykin as an emblem of Rumsfeld’s arrogance management problem.

Rumsfeld’s handling of the controversy over remarks made by one of his top generals likening Islam to Satan crystallizes much of the problem. Bush had to spend valuable time on his Asian trip convincing leaders that Lt. Gen. William Boykin was not speaking for the U.S. government. Boykin is Rumsfeld’s point person on intelligence, a job that demands clear-eyed, hard-edged thinking free of ideological or religious bias. It’s no place for simplistic comparisons between good and evil.

In a speech that Boykin regularly gives, he tells the story of an aerial photo he took over Mogadishu that, when it was developed, revealed a black smudge over the city. Rather than accept the mark as a thumb print from whoever processed the film, Boykin became convinced that it was a sign of the evil hanging over the Somali city.

Lawd, lawd, deliver us from the Thumbprints of Evil. That is, as I mentioned earlier, our Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. I got a bad feeling about this plan …