WINNING THE WAR
The session with odierno in kirkuk was vintage Rumsfeld, and Odierno, a rising star inside the Army, passed the test easily. "When it happens to someone who can't hold his own against the boss," says an aide, "you just want someone else to come along and put him out of his misery." Rumsfeld laughs at this report when he hears it a few days later. "I was doing my thing," he says of that day in Kirkuk. "It's what I do all day, every day." Rumsfeld doesn't have a name for his habit of withering cross-examination, but he does have an analogy. "My theory in skiing is, if you're not falling, you're not trying, and that's worth remembering. I teach that to my grandchildren." The former Navy instructor pilot tries a different metaphor: "You've got to work the edge of the envelope."

What feels like sport to Rumsfeld is more like a blood sport to those who have to face him. They describe a man who "listens aggressively," who wants to watch you take a punch and see how you react. "He really does want to smack you," says an aide. "From that, he thinks, ÔI will learn something I don't know and you weren't planning to teach me.' The truth might not tumble out of you otherwise."

It was in a series of such back-and-forth sessions that Rumsfeld crafted the war on Iraq. Normally, combatant commanders like former Centcom chief General Tommy Franks would take their plans to Washington for quick approval; under Rumsfeld, Franks had to redraw them repeatedly. Other generals were alarmed to see a Defense Secretary get so far down in the weeds of a military operation. Not since Robert McNamara's Pentagon had civilian authority reached so deeply into the order of battle. Both men played down this back-and-forth at the time. Franks has since told his fellow generals that the early sparring with Rumsfeld was about building trust. Once the shooting started, it enabled him to make hundreds of instantaneous calls without having to run each one by Washington.

Still, as it took shape, Rumsfeld left his marks on the war plan—and then slapped a new coat of paint on the thing when he was done. Rumsfeld's notion was to do more—and do it faster and deadlier—with less. So he mixed in a larger number of special forces than the Army had originally envisioned, giving the commandos a central role. He shortened the soften-'em-up air war to just a few days instead of the more traditional few weeks. But the final surprise belonged to Franks: he opted to begin the ground war before the air war to preserve tactical surprise. Finally, he forced the Army, Navy and Air Force to do something they had more or less avoided for 50 years: fight together instead of carving up the battlefield and reserving each slice for a different service. One contingent of Army troops in western Iraq was even under the command of an Air Force colonel.

But where Rumsfeld really jerked the Army's chain was in reversing the long-held faith that the U.S. must apply overwhelming power overseas—or none at all. That doctrine, named after Secretary of State Colin Powell, was one of the lessons taken away by the men who fought as young officers in Vietnam. When those lieutenants and captains ripened into colonels and generals, they made the all-or-nothing Army the only kind America would field. By the early 1990s, as the U.S. began to face peskier enemies overseas, the doctrine began to unravel.

Discussing how to apply force to Bosnia in 1994, Madeleine Albright, then Bill Clinton's U.N. ambassador, famously asked Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Rumsfeld too saw the problem when he returned to the Pentagon after a 24-year absence. He told Bush in early 2001 that the U.S. should stop being afraid of "leaning" into problems overseas, shouldn't shy away from getting involved. He believed the Powell doctrine gave a President fewer, not more options. He also recognized that the Pentagon he had run at the age of 43 for Gerald Ford in 1976 had not changed very much since then. His initial campaign to remake the Pentagon by shrinking the military went nowhere until 9/11. But after that, there was no stopping him, though his ambitions for reform would change as well.

"Rumsfeld was the first to see after 9/11 that security could be defined broadly and could be used to justify almost anything," says John Hamre, a Deputy Defense Secretary under Clinton and now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He was the first to realize the shift of power in Washington from the Congress back to the Executive Branch. No one moved so spectacularly, so systematically at a time when everyone else was just confused and scared. Remember: when the plane attacked the Pentagon, Rumsfeld ran toward the accident. He is very perceptive in the midst of chaos. That's when he gets his best results."

So as Iraq came into his sights, Rumsfeld pressed Franks to shrink the invasion force, speed the drive to Baghdad and forget about the more traditional, mile-by-bloody-mile invasion tactics that meant stopping at every step to consolidate the coalition's gains. Rumsfeld sold the war in a series of almost daily Pentagon briefings that centered not on the risks of besieging Baghdad but on the risks of not doing so. "We just suffered 3,000 dead in Sept. 11," he mused during a television interview in early February. "If the U.S. were to experience a Sept. 11 with a biological attack ... we would see not just 3,000 potentially but 30,000 or 300,000 people [dead]. And that's the test ... It seems to me ... that we, each person, has to answer that question, Are we willing to put that at risk?"

When they were done, Rumsfeld and Franks invaded a nation 25 times the size of nearby Kuwait, with roughly half the troops used in 1991—a revolution in the way the U.S. fights wars. Baghdad fell in 21 days, and the U.S. suffered 103 combat fatalities. The plan, according to retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Jay Farrar, "proved to the Army that it can go in lighter and sustain itself longer than it ever imagined."

BUNGLING THE PEACE
Ask top pentagon officials whether Rumsfeld is a strategic or a tactical thinker, and they reply yes. For every blue-sky conversation in Rumsfeld's office about, say, the limits of technology, there is another about ensuring that Pentagon officials adhere to ethics rules when accepting honorary gifts from foreign leaders. Given that depth of field and Rumsfeld's deft handling of the war, it's hard to escape the question, Where was he on the peace? How could a man with trifocal vision fail to see that the peace would need as much planning as the war? As a senior Pentagon officer put it, "The war gets an A-minus, but postwar is more a C-minus or D-plus."

Those questions are the biggest mystery of Rumsfeld's year. Part of the problem, ironically, was the brilliant war plan itself. Rumsfeld and Franks so stripped down the invasion force for speed that the occupation army that came out the other end was too small for the job of peacekeeping. The military suddenly found itself having to protect banks, arms dumps, even gas stations, with just a handful of divisions. But there were other problems too. Administration officials, including some close to Rumsfeld, were suffused with the convenient belief that Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as a liberator the moment G.I.s landed. The Pentagon, after almost two years of nonstop rivalry with other agencies, had become almost genetically incapable of—some said uninterested in—working with the State Department on anything Iraq related, including postwar planning, which was one of State's strengths.

Rumsfeld would never admit that he made a mistake, says an aide, who adds, "That's a good thing when selling a policy or a war. But if the choice turns out to be wrong, he probably won't acknowledge it until it's turned into a disaster."

Indeed, Rumsfeld answers the question of whether he misjudged the postwar challenges with a trademark Rumination. "Let me give you a perspective," he says. "You come into these jobs—there's not a lot of time for reflection—you better know two-thirds of the things you're gonna need to know when you get in here, 'cause you're not going to have time to learn three-quarters. You can learn an eighth or a quarter or a third, but you can't learn it all. And the same thing is true in a big, massive project like a war. You've got to get into as many of the key pieces, pick the right pieces that are most important and then pass them off to somebody."

In this case, that somebody was Jay Garner, a retired three star Rumsfeld knew since the two had worked together studying U.S. space policy three years before. This was probably Rumsfeld's first misstep: giving a retired general the job of organizing postwar Iraq—a job in which Garner would have to compete for money and manpower with a dozen other active-duty four-star generals. Rumsfeld didn't have a lot of great options. The Pentagon doesn't have an agency for peacekeeping or nation building or anything in between, and neither the military nor the White House regarded those chores as terribly important. As a consequence, Garner's show was always a second- or third-order problem inside an institution that counts waging wars—and keeping its troops alive to fight them—its first 10 priorities.

But Garner faced another challenge: the Bush Administration wasn't keen to acknowledge what he was doing. Before the shooting started, the White House was at pains to disguise any indication that a war was inevitable. The decision to go to war was Baghdad's, not Washington's, went the daily talking point. Job one was to position the President as a reluctant warrior. Any emphasis on what would come after the war would have put the President in a public relations bind. That didn't mean Garner couldn't do his job in secret. It simply meant that no one was inclined to give his job a very high priority, at least in public. A top Pentagon official explained the balancing act this way: "It was all perverted.

The government was still going through this charade that we were going to solve it peacefully, so we couldn't get too far out there on the postwar. It was a cost-benefit analysis: Was the fig leaf of diplomacy as important as getting it right on the ground? It was decided that it was." And where was Rumsfeld in all this? Looking back a few days ago on this complicated minuet, Rumsfeld half conceded only that the U.S. was trying to avoid any impression that war was unavoidable. "We didn't want that inevitability," he said, pausing slightly before quickly editing himself, "because it wasn't inevitable! We were hoping it wouldn't happen."

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