"Persuasion Beyond Logic: The Importance of Rhetorical Training for Military Officers"

About the Author

Megan McIntyre is a PhD student at the University of South Florida where she works as Mentoring Coordinator for the University's First Year Composition program. Her research interests include writing pedagogy and practice as well as the intersections of rhetoric, writing, ethics, and politics.

Contents

Introduction

Donald Rumsfeld and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Winning Hearts & Minds: The Way Forward in Afghanistan

Rhetorical Training & Effective Intercultural Communication

An Overview of Rhetorical Training

Conclusion

Works Cited

Donald Rumsfeld and Operation Iraqi Freedom

It was the night before Christmas Eve, nearly two years into what would become a seven-plus-year-long conflict. Late in the afternoon, General John Batiste introduced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to a little over one hundred soldiers gathered to meet the Secretary in the courtyard of what had been, until the US led invasion in 2003, one of Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces in Tikrit, Iraq. After reviewing Rumsfeld’s biography, General Batiste finally introduced the Secretary to the troops as “a man with the courage and conviction to win the war on terrorism” (Margolick). Mr. Rumsfeld thanked him and offered the troops some encouragement, then herded the reporters accompanying him into Batiste’s office in another of Saddam’s palaces. It was a marble-lined room with a view of the Tigris that had been home to only God-knows-what during the dictator’s rule; now it housed the man tasked with leading US and coalition operations to weed out Saddam’s former allies in Tikrit. Once inside the office, Rumsfeld spoke briefly to the reporters following him about the progress Batiste and his troops had made in the region, and then turned to Batiste to ask a question that had been circulating in the press for months: was there anything this leader of the first infantry division had asked for from Rumsfeld’s office and not received?

The question Rumsfeld surprised Batiste with in his office in 2004 was far more complicated than it may first appear. In order to understand the weight of the question, it is necessary to rewind our story a bit: less than a year into Operation Iraqi Freedom, it became clear to many observers that things were not going as expected in the conflict. The spring of 2004 proved to be one of the bloodiest of the entire war and weapons of mass destruction were still nowhere to be found. The difficulties with executing the war, however, did not come as a shock to many in the upper echelons of the military. Before the invasion of Iraq, before Baghdad fell and President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, before the scandal at Abu Ghraib, General Eric Shinseki told the armed Senate Armed Services Committee, in February of 2003, that the war would require significantly more troops than the Department of Defense had claimed: “then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, a Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient in Vietnam, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that because of Iraq's size and ethnic makeup, any occupying force would require ‘on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers’” (Schlesinger). In the end, however, the average number of boots on the ground in 2003 was less than 70,000 soldiers (Belasco 9). The discrepancy in troop numbers, as well as the many disagreements between the civilian leadership in the Bush administration and the military officers tasked with carrying out the mission in Iraq, suggest that there were a number of things the military needed in Iraq that it did not have.

Back in Batiste’s office in December of 2004, General Batiste, who would later (after his own retirement) call for Rumsfeld’s resignation for his mishandling of the War in Iraq, says he was shocked by Rumsfeld’s question. Even then, Batiste thought Rumsfeld had mishandled not just the initial invasion of Iraq but the rebuilding phase as well. In a Vanity Fair interview in 2007, Dan Margolick asked the General if he wished he’d done things differently that day. "Do I wish I'd said something in front of all that press there? Maybe, but we don't air our differences in public" (Margolick). Critics of Batiste’s statements after his retirement question his decision not to address Mr. Rumsfeld’s mistakes when asked directly by the Secretary; others wonder why he failed to request a private meeting with Rumsfeld to address his concerns. Batiste’s answer? "I didn't trust Rumsfeld a bit," he told Margolick. "I had seen the way he treated other officers and discounted their advice. He wasn't going to listen anyway."

Batiste was not alone in his thinking. One by one, six of the most well respected officers from across the branches of the military echoed Batiste: Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold penned a piece for Time magazine in April of 2006 arguing for the ouster of Rumsfeld and his team as Major General Paul Eaton had done in the New York Times the month before. Three other retired generals followed their lead, answering questions asked in the wake of the two editorials and General Batiste’s speech at the Rochester Rotary Club. All six generals agreed: it was time for Rumsfeld to go because of, Margolick explains in his Vanity Fair article the following year, “his disastrous management of an ill-conceived and, some felt, entirely unnecessary war, one in which an overly compliant military—from the generals on to the Joint Chiefs—had been complicit, or at least supine” (Margolick).

The unfortunate truth, cast into stark relief by Batiste’s account of that winter evening in 2004, is that even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not prepared to navigate a discussion with someone like Rumsfeld. Despite their years of combat experience and their strategic military expertise, the officers with the opportunity to address Rumsfeld about his war plans before the invasion and his rebuilding plans after the invasion were ill-equipped to persuade someone who could not be convinced by strategic, logical thinking.