A U.S. cargo ship, the SS Mayaguez, was raided by a Cambodian naval force in May 1975. Another of the Kissinger legacies in the region had been the fall of Cambodia, a month before, to the Khmer Rouge, and the new communist regime was flexing its muscles. The ships thirty-eight American crew members were taken prisoner. Rumsfeld, with Kissinger’s concurrence, persuaded Ford to bypass diplomacy and display his toughness, first by bombing the port city of Kompong Som and then by ordering an operation aimed at rescuing the crew. Ford denounced "an act of piracy," and U.S. Marines, like swashbucklers, swung aboard the captured ship (the first such hostile boarding at sea since 1826), only to find it abandoned. In another foreshadowing, the Rumsfeld circle had based its action on ridiculously flawed intelligence. Hundreds of other Marines invaded an island where the captured crewmen were thought to be. In the battle there, forty Americans were killed–for nothing. It was then discovered that the Mayaguez crew had been released unharmed shortly after being captured, set adrift in a Thai fishing vessel. Despite vast difference in scale and intention the incompetent rescue attempt was a kind of overture, complete with the music of bombing for the war Rumsfeld would orchestrate Against Iraq beginning in 2003. The Mayaguez action was overwhelming popular with Americans, lethal to young U.S. soldiers–and it was unnecessary. (James Carroll, House of War, p. 359.)
Rumsfeld was Ford’s chief of staff at the time. Later that year, Ford appointed him Secretary of Defense. It’s the Republican way–promote failure in the name of toughness. "Strong and wrong" — pretty much sums up the GOP mentality that leads time and time again to oafish feats of muscular idiocy. In fairness, the Scoop Jackson/Joe Lieberman/Peter Beinart wing of the Dems are just as complicit in this brawn over brains approach.
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