Lute is in no way a "war czar" exercising real authority over either or both of America's ongoing wars. But he is being falsely presented as one when the one man who was, in reality, such a "war czar" in every sense of the word, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was fired from his job last November for bungling it.

As we noted earlier in this series, the term "war czar" means giving an individual the final, defining authority over the issues he was directing. Rumsfeld fitted that category perfectly. In his six years as defense secretary he enjoyed an authority over military, intelligence, war planning and postwar administration that none of his predecessors ever had in the previous 60 years.

Even the controversial Robert McNamara, who so notoriously micromanaged even the details of combat and air operations in Vietnam 40 years ago, had to share his authority with his similarly obsessive micromanaging boss, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. But President George W. Bush effectively delegated all authority over running the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts to Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld did not even have to dispute policymaking turf with the secretary of state or the director of central intelligence. He kept jealous control over the 12 of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that come under the budgetary allocations of the U.S. Department of Defense and that command 80 percent of total annual intelligence spending. And even several of his own senior officials admitted after his fall that he made a mockery of inter-agency cooperation, especially with the State Department, the CIA and the Department of Energy.

This is what makes so much of the criticism that has been thrown at State and the CIA over their supposed poor performance in Iraq so unfair and even cynical. Rumsfeld wielded his very real power as "war czar" to ignore the warnings they gave and the desperately needed professional expertise they offered.

Yet in his grand direction of both wars, Rumsfeld was defined by his inattention and casualness. He jealously hoarded the powers of a real "war czar" in both theaters for his own use and those of his trusted subordinates. Yet his primary attention was always focused on far distant horizons -- on the transformations promised by his hugely ambitious Future Combat Systems program to integrate command and control of the U.S. armed forces to a degree of centralization and information technology interactive systems never before attempted, and to push ahead with space-based programs and ballistic missile defense ones. Compared to these, the day-to-day "housekeeping" job of staying on top of rapidly transforming political developments and adapting insurgent strategies in both Afghanistan and Iraq took poor third and fourth places.

Lute is going to find himself in a very different position from Rumsfeld. Where Rumsfeld paid almost no attention to Iraq and Afghanistan, except to keep other agencies out of Iraq in particular, Lute will be dealing with both conflicts full time. But where Rumsfeld was a real "czar" in the control he wielded over the enormous Department of Defense annual budget, which more than doubled from $365 billion to more than $750 billion during his six years in office, Lute will command no independent budget at all.

Nor will he enjoy any of the powers of the secretary of defense, the army chief of staff, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CENTCOM commander, the ground forces commander in Iraq or even any of the regional ground forces commanders in Iraq.

Lute will have the thankless jobs of listening, analyzing and then recommending. He will not even be in a position to recommend actions directly to the president of the United States, the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His recommendations will be reported to a national security adviser who has repeatedly been over-ruled, outflanked or imposed upon by successive secretaries of defense and state and even by his own deputy.

Through no fault of his own, Lute has been selected for a position that is a shadow of the grandiose title with which it has been popularly imbued. He will have no independent budgetary or bureaucratic clout in a sclerotic federal government in which power and respect are totally dependent on such things.

He truly is taking on a "Mission Impossible."

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