Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld is the former secretary of defense under President George W. Bush.

On Iraq

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

"Well, we know that Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons. And we know he has an active program for the development of nuclear weapons. I suppose what it would prove would be that the inspections process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis if they find nothing. That's what one would know if that turned out to be the case. There's no question but that the Iraqi regime is clever. They have spent a lot of time hiding things, dispersing things, tunneling underground, taking documentation and moving it to different locations in the past, preventing inspectors from getting access, listening in on what inspectors intend to do. And before the inspectors arrive to do it, seeing that what was there is moved or the effort is frustrated in some way."

"And absent a dictator, absent the Saddam Hussein regime, our goal is to first have a single country, not have the country broken up into pieces. It would be to see that it was a country without weapons of mass destruction, it was a country that did not try to impose its will on its neighbors, and it was a country that was respectful of the rights of the minorities and the various religious and ethnic groups that exist in the country." Above quotes are from a 2002 interview [[1]]

We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons — including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. … His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons—including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox." 2002 presentation to Congress. [[2]]

"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." [[3]]

Since the Iraq War and the widespread opinion that the invasion and subsequent impacts have been disastrous, Rumsfeld has tried to distance himself from the war and the supposed effort to implement American-style Democracy in Iraq. In 2015 he said: "I'm not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories," the former defense secretary told the Times, a British newspaper, in a piece published last week. "The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words." [[4]]

However, this statement runs contrary to numerous Rumsfeld statements during the escalation of the war including on from 2005 where when discussing the concept of Democracy in Iraq, Rumsfeld stated: "Well certainly the success that's being achieved there, if one thinks about it, there were elections in January, then there was, October 15 in Iraq, there was a referendum on the constitution that had been drafted by the people elected by the Iraqi people, and now we're looking towards a third election in a single year on December 15, where the people will be electing people under their new constitution. That is an enormous step forward for the people of Iraq." 2005 [[5]]