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This time via Newsweek, a sister publication to the Washington Post. The subject? Donald Rumsfeld. Two anecdotes stand out:

In March 2006, Rumsfeld invited six of the Pentagon’s regular outside advisers in to be briefed and ask questions. One was Ken Adelman, a longtime Rumsfeld friend and vehement early supporter of the war who had become entirely disillusioned over the administration’s handling of the postwar. His relationship with Rumsfeld was almost over.

“What metrics would you use for success in Iraq?” Adelman asked Rumsfeld. “You know, for winning the war?”

“Oh, there are hundreds,” Rumsfeld replied. “It’s just so complicated that there are hundreds.”

“Wait a minute,” Adelman insisted. “A former boss of mine always said identify three or four things, then always ask about, get measurements and you’ll get progress or else you’ll never get any progress.” The former boss was Rumsfeld himself, who had driven the point home to Adelman 35 years ago, when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity. What are they? Adelman insisted.

Rumsfeld said it was so complicated that he could not give a list. “Hundreds,” he insisted.

Adelman believed that meant there was a total lack of accountability. If Rumsfeld didn’t agree to any criteria, he couldn’t be said to have failed on any criteria.

“Then you don’t have anything,” Adelman said. He left as dis turbed as ever. There was no accountability[...]

On Wednesday, May 24, 2006, the intelligence division of the Joint Staff, the J-2, circulated an intelligence assessment, classified SECRET, that showed that the forces of terror in Iraq were not in retreat. It put hard numbers on trends that had been reported to Bush all year. Terrorist attacks had been steadily increasing. The insurgency was gaining. Attacks were now averaging 700 to 800 a week. Every IED that was discovered—whether it detonated and caused damage or casualties or was identified and disarmed before it could do any damage—was still counted as an attack. A graph measuring attacks from May 2003 to May 2006 showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks was as high as they had ever been—exceeding 3,500 a month.

I told Rumsfeld that I understood the number of attacks was going up.

“That’s probably true,” he said. “It is also probably true that our data’s better, and we’re categorizing more things as attacks. A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things—a banana and an apple and an orange.”

[...]In July 2006, I interviewed Rumsfeld on two successive afternoons. I asked him about troop levels—a key issue and point of contention. The record showed that the plan for invading Iraq had a top number of 275,000 ground combat forces, including about 90,000 who were scheduled to flow into Iraq in the weeks and months after March 19, 2003, when the war began. Rumsfeld said it is one of the great “canards” that he had decided or unduly influenced the decision to not bring in the 90,000. It was all on General Franks’s recommendation, he said. But by the summer of 2006, Rumsfeld had softened his position on the issue of whether there were enough troops. “It’s entirely possible there were too many at some point and too few at some point, because no one’s perfect,” he said. “In retrospect I have not seen or heard anything from the other opiners that suggests to me that they have any reason to believe that they were right and we were wrong. Nor can I prove we were right and they were wrong. The only thing I can say is they seem to have a lot more certainty than my assessment of the facts would permit me to have.”

So for Rumsfeld apparently everything is relative. There's no criteria for success or failure, because its just too complex to measure. There's no way to determine if we have the proper troop levels, because everything changes, and what's good one minute won't be the next. But here's the problem, if the man doesn't believe it is possible to measure or evaluate anything, how on earth is he supposed to lead? Leadership is entirely about setting objectives and making sure that everyone on your team understands what they are and how they will be accomplished. Without goals and metrics, that simply cannot be done.

I've saved one more anecdote to show just how dangerous a worldview this really is:

On March 16, General John Abizaid, the commander of CENTCOM and thus the top military officer for the Middle East, was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq. Afterward, he went over to see Congressman John Murtha, the 73-year old former Marine who had introduced a resolution the previous November calling for the redeployment of troops from Iraq as soon as practicable. Sitting at the round, dark wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis and held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Rumsfeld circulated a six-page SECRET memo on May 1, proposing some fixes, entitled “Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches.”

It was almost the latest version of the “Anchor Chain” memos he had written in his first months as secretary in 2001—a cry from his bureaucratic and managerial heart. Not only was the Defense Department tangled in its anchor chain but so was the rest of the U.S. government, and the world.

He dictated, “The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”

Got that? The man in charge of leading the Pentagon thinks it is so badly broken that it cannot be lead, and worse, that even the best leader will ultimately fail. And on top of that, that this inevitable failure should not and cannot be interpreted as his fault.

This man shouldn't be allowed to lead a parade, and he's leading our war. But for political reasons, Bush will not replace him:

After Bush’s re-election in November 2004, the biggest question mark at the White House was Rumsfeld. Should he stay? White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had to approach the issue with delicacy. The biggest voice for change was outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell. In one conversation, Powell had told Card, “If I go, Don should go.” Bush had decided to replace Powell with Rice, but it was unclear who he wanted at Defense.

Card got out his “hit-by-the-bus” book, an 8½-by-11-inch spiral notebook, a half-inch thick with a blue cover. On separate pages he had lists of possible replacements for all the major administration posts, including his own. The names were listed in no particular order. Card kept the notebook in his desk at the White House and periodically added or deleted names. He had intentionally used a student notebook, something he had bought himself, so it wouldn’t be considered a government document or a presidential record that might someday be opened to history. It was private and personal.

His list of 11 possible Rumsfeld replacements included Senator Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and Republican Arizona Senator John McCain.

But Card had what he thought was a great idea—a sleeper candidate. The best replacement for Rumsfeld would be James A. Baker III. “Everyone would say, ‘Phew,’” Card said. “No learning curve. Great. Interesting.” Baker was 74, only two years older than Rumsfeld. He had served in the Marine Corps. He had been the best modern White House chief of staff, Card thought. He had successfully handled the 2000 Florida recount for Bush. Mr. President, this is my quiet counsel, Card said. Put a diplomat in the Defense Department.

The president seemed genuinely intrigued. You don’t have to rush to make a decision, Card advised. But the president would not even authorize Card to send out feelers or to enter into any discussion with Baker.

Card spoke with Rumsfeld, who talked as if he presumed there would be no change. Rumsfeld wanted to stay.

Soon Karl Rove weighed in. A contentious session with Congress was coming up. As he saw it, the Democrats were in no mood for a honeymoon. With Rice’s confirmation hearing and with the expected nomination of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, would another Senate confirmation overload the system? And, clearly, the conduct of the war in Iraq would be the subject of confirmation hearings for anyone Bush nominated to be the new secretary of defense.

Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war. Jesus, no.

In mid-December the president made his final decision. Rumsfeld would stay, he indicated to Cheney and Card. He couldn’t change Rumsfeld.

“That didn’t mean he didn’t want to,” Card later said.

Got that? Bush really wanted to make a change, but his political advisor convinced him not to. In the middle of a war he has defined as the defining war of this entire century, he let political considerations trump national security.

Finally, I'll close without comment with one last Rumsfeld moment:

I asked Rumsfeld what was the best, most optimistic scenario for a positive outcome in Iraq.

“This business is ugly,” he replied. “It’s tough. There isn’t any best. A long, hard slog, I think I wrote years ago. We’re facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands … They’re different than our Congress understands. They’re different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope with and deal with. We’re dealing with enemies that can turn inside our decision circles.” The enemy can move swiftly, he said. “They don’t have parliaments and bureaucracies and real estate to defend and interact with or deal with or cope with. They can do what they want. They aren’t held accountable for lying or for killing innocent men, women and children.

“There’s something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people’s heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn’t do.”

“Are you optimistic?” I asked.

Rumsfeld looked through me and continued. Three of his aides who were sitting with us at the table in his office could not help but register surprise as Rumsfeld plowed on without answering.

“We’re fighting the first war in history in the new century,” he continued, “and with all these new realities, with an industrial-age organization in an environment that has not adapted and adjusted, a public environment that has not adapted and adjusted.”

At the end of the second of two interviews, I quoted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “Any military commander who is honest with you will say he’s made mistakes that have cost lives.”

“Um hmm,” Rumsfeld said.

“Is that correct?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that a military commander ...”

“Which you are,” I interrupted.

“No I’m not,” the secretary of defense said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“No, no. Well … ”

“Yes. Yes,” I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the hierarchy. “It’s commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander.”

“I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case.”