Rumsfeld Iraq War Quotes

And for once, Donald Rumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war made sense to me: "As we know," he said, famously, "there are known knowns-things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns-things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns- things we don't know we don't know.

I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush et al. wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be. They expected to find a unified state like Japan in 1945. Instead, they found a perpetual civil war among majority Shi’a Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein—a Sunni—had imposed a brutal peace on the country, but with him gone, the civil war reheated, and now it’s … erupted, and the CPA is embroiled. When you’re in control, neutrality isn’t possible.

Paul Bremer’s decrees to disband the Iraqi Army, radically de-Ba’athify Iraq, and prohibit local elections; Bremer reported to Rumsfeld, and the secretary was therefore responsible

difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the major subject of this book. While the Bush administration—and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and L. Paul Bremer III—bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004, blame also must rest with the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counter-insurgency warfare. The undefeated Saddam Hussein of 1991 The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq can’t be viewed in isolation. The chain of events began more than a decade earlier with the botched close of the 1991 Gulf War and then it continued in the U.S. effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the years that followed.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t acknowledge that there was an insurgency. (Rumsfeld was old enough to know, from Vietnam days, that defeating an insurgency required a counterinsurgency strategy, which in turn would leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq for years, maybe decades—whereas he just wanted to get in, get out, and move on to oust the next tyrant standing in the way of America’s post–Cold War dominance.) Out

Between 1983 and 1988, Searle Pharmaceuticals CEO Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Ronald Reagan’s envoy in Iraq, arranged for the top-secret shipment of tons of chemical and biological armaments, including anthrax and bubonic plague, to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hoping to reverse his looming defeat by Iran’s million-man army. Ayatollah Khomeini’s victorious Iranian forces were then routing Saddam in their war over the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration feared