Trying to make sense of the avalanche of criticism that has come crashing down on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld over the past week, we plucked from our bookshelf a copy of Midge Decter’s 2003 biography, “Rumsfeld.”The book reminded us of the early days of the Iraq war, when Mr. Rumsfeld was also the target for highly excited criticism.

A retired general, Barry McCaffrey, was predicting between 2,000 and 3,000 American casualties on the way to Baghdad. Evan Thomas and John Barry of Newsweek were worrying that the conflict was going to blow up into a general Middle East war. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker was quoting senior American officials as amazed that the Iraqis weren’t scared.

All this turned out to be not about how the war was going. As Ms. Decter points out, it was out of the question from the beginning that America might lose. “Rather,”as Ms. Decter put it,”what they appeared to be doing was taking this opportunity to settle old scores.”

We have a similar sense in respect of the feeding frenzy that has now erupted around Mr. Rumsfeld as a consequence of the evidence of abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American personnel in Iraq. It’s not about Mr. Rumsfeld’s responsibility for the abuses and his failure to prevent them. If this were a genuine effort to get to the bottom of those abuses — rather than a political witch-hunt — there would be Washington officials other than Mr. Rumsfeld in the dock.

After all, the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in interrogating the Iraqi prisoners — but you haven’t seen George Tenet yet hauled before Congress, nor have you seen a congressional inquiry into what ties the “contractors” involved in the interrogations had to the CIA. Also not yet hauled before Congress has been an American counterterrorism official formerly at the CIA, now ensconced at the State Department, Cofer Black, who has said that after September 11, “the gloves were off.”

No, if you listen carefully, most of those calling for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign now were calling for him to resign even before word of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners became known. Rep. Charles Rangel of New York originally introduced a Congressional resolution calling for the resignation of Secretary Rumsfeld on November 7, 2003. Senator Kerry, in an appearance on “The Charlie Rose Show” on October 27, 2003, said Mr. Rumsfeld “absolutely” should resign or be fired by the president.

And much of the same press corps that is now vilifying Mr. Rumsfeld for his supposed failure to rein in his military intelligence interrogators in Iraq are the same ones who accused him of being insufficiently deferential to military intelligence when it came to their skepticism of Iraq-Al Qaeda cooperation.

These old scores may relate to whether it was right to go to war in Iraq in the first place, or to Mr. Rumsfeld’s battle to assert civilian control over the Pentagon. They may go back to Mr. Rumsfeld’s drive to modernize the military that so antagonized some of the old service chiefs. But our guess is that in the long light of history, Mr. Rumsfeld’s current detractors are going to look as foolish as do the ones from the early days of the war.