Rumsfeld would offer the "creative" plan for the Iraq invasion that his president had requested that tearful evening in September 2001, one that envisioned a relative handful of troops150,000, fewer than half the number the elder Bush had assembled a decade before for the much less ambitious Desert Stormand foresaw an invasion that would begin in shock and awe and an overwhelming rush to Baghdad. As for the occupationwell, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfelds troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, "I don't do quagmires."
It did not turn out that way. Having watched from the Oval Office in 1975 the last torturous hours of the United States extracting itself from Vietnamthe helicopters fleeing the roof of the US embassy in SaigonRumsfeld would be condemned to thrash about in his self-made quagmire for almost four years, sinking ever deeper in the muck as nearly five thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.
