Jonathan Chait of The New Republic offers a hilarious tour through pre-2004 conservative hero worship of Donald Rumsfeld:

Nordlinger’s cover story also featured a series of more specific descriptions of Rumsfeld that do not seem terribly prescient in light of subsequent events. For example, Nordlinger gushed that Rumsfeld “must be the most uneuphemistic person alive. He is totally immune, and allergic, to ‘spin.’” This, of the man who would go on to describe the disintegration of order in postwar Iraq as “untidy” and portray hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay as being on a “diet.” Nordlinger’s article also graciously noted that, despite their man being proven absolutely correct on absolutely everything, “Rumsfeld staffers take pains not to say ‘I told you so.’” (Today, presumably, Rumsfeld’s allies find it easier not to gloat.)

A recurrent theme among the Rumsfeld hagiographers was that their hero was a brilliant executive, arriving at the correct decision time and again through his peerless command of the bureaucratic process. This image was reflected in the 2002 bestseller The Rumsfeld Way. The author, Jeffrey Krames, has written a similar paean to iconic CEO Jack Welch, and his Rumsfeld book followed the conventions of executive porn, turning Rumsfeld’s career into leadership dictums that can be applied to the corporate world. He was firm yet flexible, thorough yet decisive, ruthless yet moral, and so on. Each chapter concluded with a series of bullet-point takeaway lessons from Rumsfeld’s career. Thus the reader learned that Rumsfeld’s management style was governed by such principles as “Never underestimate the importance of listening,” “Underpromise and overdeliver,” “Decentralize,” and “Avoid false forecasts.”

This same awed deference to Rumsfeld’s managerial genius is a primary theme in Decter’s book. “[O]ne of Rumsfeld’s special talents,” she notes at one point, is creating “a process where everyone is learning and everyone is contributing.” Tell that to Brigadier General Mark Scheid, who told the Newport News Daily Press that, in the run-up to the war, Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next subordinate who pestered him about the need to plan for a possible occupation.

…In retrospect, though, the quasi-salacious hero worship stands out less than Decter’s wholehearted endorsement of Rumsfeld’s hallucinatory worldview. In Decter’s telling, Rumsfeld had the brilliant foresight to transform the military into a lighter, smaller force. (“[W]ho could honestly doubt the brilliance of the military plan [in Iraq]?” she asked, in what was at the time intended to be a rhetorical question.) Alas, as she explained, his masterful strategy aroused the envy of lesser minds around him. As she put it, “[t]hose whose resistance he had successfully put down would set out to exact their revenge by attacking his plan for the conduct of the approaching war in Iraq.” For instance, she noted incredulously, “Ralph Peters complained that there were still not enough troops in Iraq to do what was necessary. They might have won the war handily … but now there were not enough boots on the ground to establish the rule of law.” Decter presented this objection as self-evidently wrong.