Donald Rumsfeld on War & Peace Secretary of Defense (Pres. Bush Cabinet)

Sub-sections under War & Peace:
• Iraq
• Iraq Survey Group Report
• Other issues under War & Peace

1965: voted for additional $700M for Vietnam War

But I started to have concerns in May 1965, when a Vietnam War appropriation bill came before the House, and President Johnson urgently requested an additional $700 million for the Department of Defense. The vote turned into a proxy fight between supporters and opponents of the war. In the end, I voted for the appropriations.

It was clear that the war in Vietnam had become the single most important issue facing the country.

US & USSR invasions differed: we don't covet their land

Replaced Powell’s “Overwhelming Force” with “Less is More”

An important contrast can be found in the 1991 Gulf War. Powell’s concept was “Go in big & end it quickly. We could not put the US through another Vietnam.“ The plan to use overwhelming force to guarantee victory became known as the Powell Doctrine.

In 2001, things were different. The two great Pentagon ideas--a new, ”refreshed“ Iraq war plan, as Rumsfeld called it, and military transformation--converged.

The point of the Iraq war plan was: Get to Baghdad, and fast. It echoed Rumsfeld’s desire--”assume risk.“ The Powell Doctrine of trying to guarantee success was out. Rapid, decisive warfare was in.

Afghanistan was CIA operation; Iraq was his operation

The CIA stepped in to fill the void. They could bring to bear all the resources of the intelligence community, combined with US military power and Special Forces, harness the factional opposition known as the Northern Alliance, defeat the Taliban and close out the al Qaeda sanctuary.

Rumsfeld sat uneasily on the sidelines. At an NSC meeting on October 16, his frustration boiled over. "This is CIA's strategy," he declared. "They developed the strategy. We're just executing the strategy." Rumsfeld had been humiliated. Never again. The next month, when the president ordered him to look seriously at the Iraq war plan, Rumsfeld made it his personal project. This would be his.

1971: Anti-war advocate: get out of Vietnam quickly

The problem was that Rumsfeld was becoming, from Nixon and Kissinger's perspective, a troublesome antiwar advocate. Increasingly, Rumsfeld had emerged at the center of a small group of administration officials, all of them involved with domestic policy, who were privately questioning in staff meetings why the administration could not move more quickly to end the war.

"They don't know a goddamn thing about foreign policy!" Nixon had exploded earlier. "They're only concerned about, frankly, peace at any price, really. Because all they're concerned with is, well, revenue-sharing and environment and all that."

Legal ban on assassinations limits pursuit of bin Laden

Rumsfeld said the legal ban on government-sponsored assassinations restricts what the government can do in its pursuit of bin Laden, who is described as the prime suspect in the attacks. But former president Bill Clinton, in an interview with NBC News, said the ban should pose no hurdle. The ban applies only to heads of state, not terrorists, he said. “I can assure you we’ve been trying to get Osama bin Laden for the last several years.”

Balkans shows that NATO needs to upgrade

President Bush plans to review our involvement in the Balkans, with the hope of maintaining the most appropriate type and scale of involvement. We will not act unilaterally, nor fail to consult our allies. Of that you can be certain.

When we started in Bosnia, we deployed tens of thousands of heavily armed forces. Today, we still have capable force there, but the mission has changed and the force is appropriately smaller & lighter. We have made these incremental changes through routine reviews, [and the] process of consultation, of assessment, and change should continue. It is the willingness of nations to act in concert that helps sustain security and strengthen the peace.

Expect terrorists to get bio, chem, & nuke weapons

Rumsfeld said, “It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to expect that at some point those nations will work with those terrorist networks and assist them in achieving and obtaining those kinds of capabilities.“ Rumsfeld did not name those terrorist-supporting nations. But a Department of Defense report released in January said that Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan and Libya all have active chemical or biological weapons programs. In addition, Iraq and Iran are trying to acquire materials for nuclear devices, the report said.

2001: Counseled attacking Iraq at same time as Afghanistan

Colin cautioned against it. "We would lose the UN, the Islamic countries, and NATO. If we want to do Iraq, we should do it at a time of our choosing. But we should not do it now, because we don't have linkage to this event."

Dick Cheney understood the threat of Saddam Hussein and believed we had to address it. "But now is not a good time to do it," he said.

I welcomed the vigorous debate. Listening to the discussion and divergent views helped clarify my options. Unless I received definitive evidence tying Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 plot, I would work to resolve the Iraq problem diplomatically. The best way to show him we were serious was to succeed in Afghanistan.

2004: Remaining violence is thugs & pockets of dead-enders

"Any remaining violence is due to thugs, gangs, and terrorists."
--Rumsfeld, 3/14/04

"There are some who feel that the conditions are such that hey can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
--George W. Bush, 7/2/03

"You know, the country is basically peaceful."
--Paul Bremer, 9/24/03

2002: "Iraq has WMDs"; 2003: We never said Iraq had nukes

"To be considered torture, techniques must produce lasting psychological damage or suffering 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.' "
-- Justice Dept. memo, 1/9/02

"Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda; al-Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war."
--George W. Bush, memo, 2/7/02

"I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
--Donal Rumsfeld, on an interrogation technique memo, 2002

"Congress doesn't have the power to tie the president's hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique. They can't prevent the president from ordering torture."
--Justice Dept. memo, 2005

2003: Several hundred thousand troops is far off the mark

"We can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark."
--Paul Wolfowitz, Feb. 27, 2003

"The idea that it would take several hundred thousand US forces I think is far off the mark."
-- Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 28, 2003

"We don't have enough troops. We don't control the terrain."
--Colin Powell, to George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Nov. 12, 2004

"In my weeks in Iraq, I did not meet a single military officer who felt, privately, that we had enough troops."
--Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond, in a memo to Condoleezza Rice, April 26, 2004

2003: We know where WMDs are, around Tikrit & Baghdad

"We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."
-- Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

"We know that the regime has them; we know that as the regime collapses we will be led to them."
--Tony Blair, April 8, 2003

"We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. This is what this war was about and is about."
--Ari Fleischer, April 10, 2003

"We are learning more as we interrogate Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them."
-- George W. Bush, April 24, 2003

"We will find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so."
--George W. Bush, May 3, 2003.

"I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found."
--Gen Michael Hagee, Marine Corps commander, May 21, 2003

2003: American troops will be welcomed by Iraqis

2002: Iraq occupation will last 5 weeks or 5 months at most

Ridiculed Shinseki for saying Iraq needed greater manpower

Garner: key mistakes were disbanding army & deBaathification

“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said. He cited the first order banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second order disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. Third, Garner said, was the summary dismissal of an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

Briefed on risks & dangers before war; but shut down dissent

• “Current force packages are inadequate for the 1st step of securing all the major urban areas. We risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest”
• “It seems likely we will begin military action before we know whether sufficient post-war funds will be available. We risk leaving behind a great unstable mess with potential to become a haven for terrorists.”
• “The ideas, as briefed, suggest a heavy-handed imperial take-over. Danger, danger!“

A level so high that the secretary of defense couldn’t turn it down? That could only mean Bush or conceivably Cheney.

Infrastructure collapse was Saddam's fault, not U.S.

In an interview later, Rumsfeld said he realized that "the Iraqi infrastructure had been neglected for decades. I went over and looked at an electric power plant. I can remember, it was being held together with chewing gum, bobby pins and baling wire. And I looked at [it] myself and said, My Lord, this took 30 years to get there." Saddam had ruled for over 30 years. "It's going to take 30 years to get out of here, to get that--not us out--for them to get back to looking like Kuwait or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or their neighbors. And I said, My goodness, that's going to be their job over a long period of time, because it just takes that long. You can't--and they have wealth. They've got water. They've got oil. They've got industrious people. They clearly are going to be the ones that are going to have to do that."

1983: friendly talks with Saddam during his war with Iran

Rumsfeld was right. In the years afterward, the Reagan and HW Bush administrations authorized the sale to Iraq of precursors to chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax and bubonic plague, as well as conventional weapons such as Chilean cluster bombs.

But all of that came to an abrupt end when, on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. That put Saddam Hussein in control of 20% of the world's crude oil reserves. The love affair between the Republican right and the Baathist ultraright was over.

Rumsfeld says there are ties between Iraq & Al-Qaida

1971: Focus on post-war Indochina peace & reconstruction

1998: Encouraged overthrowing Saddam as US policy

Signing the letter were Donald Rumsfeld [and other neoconservatives]. Four years before 9/11, they had publicly called for an invasion of Iraq, 9/11 would be the pretext for a war they had been devising for a decade.

9/12/01: Urged focus on Iraq, not Al Qaeda

By afternoon, Rumsfeld was still going on about "getting Iraq." When Colin Powell urged that they focus on Al Qaeda, Rumsfeld pushed anew for the Iraq option.

Clarke: Rumsfeld took advantage of 9-11 to push Iraq agenda

On the morning of the 12th DOD’s focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, they said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor-Iraq must have been helping them.

No decent targets in Afghanistan, so bomb Iraq

Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.“ Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secy. Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.

Problem with UN in Iraq is its open-endedness

[UN inspector Hans] Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, was from 2000-03 head of UNMOVIC, the successor body to UNSCOM. Both bodies were tasked with searching for WMD in Iraq and their removal under UN Security Council resolution.

Saddam’s goal was to end sanctions then restart WMD program

Key Findings: Regime Strategic Intent
• Saddam Husayn so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.
• The introduction of the Oil-For-Food program in late 1996 rescued Baghdad’s economy from a terminal decline created by sanctions. The Regime quickly came to see that OFF could be corrupted to acquire foreign exchange both to further undermine sanctions and to provide the means to enhance dual-use infrastructure and potential WMD-related development.
• The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them.

Saddam’s focus for WMDs was tactical use on Iran & Israel

Key Findings: Regime Strategic Intent
• Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability-which was essentially destroyed in 1991-after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.
• Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq’s principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary.
• In Saddam’s view, WMD helped to save the Regime multiple times. He believed that during the Iran-Iraq war chemical weapons had halted Iranian ground offensives and that ballistic missile attacks on Tehran had broken its political will.

UN sanctions hurt Saddam militarily and politically

Key Findings: Regime Finance and Procurement
• Saddam severely under-estimated the economic and military costs of invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, as well as underestimating the subsequent international condemnation of his invasion of Kuwait. His initial belief was that UN sanctions would not last.
• From Saddam’s perspective, UN sanctions hindered his ability to rule Iraq with complete authority and autonomy. According to Saddam and his senior advisors, the UN, at the behest of the US, placed an economic strangle hold on Iraq.
• UN sanctions curbed Saddam’s ability to import weapons, technology, and expertise into Iraq. Sanctions also limited his ability to finance his military & intelligence forces to deal with his perceived and real external threats.
• Saddam’s evolving strategy centered on breaking free of UN sanctions in order to liberate his economy from the economic strangle-hold so he could continue to pursue his political and personal objectives.

Saddam used Oil For Food program to bank $11 billion

Key Findings: Regime Finance and Procurement
• Although Saddam had reluctantly accepted the UN’s Oil for Food (OFF) program by 1996, he soon recognized its economic value. Therefore, he resigned himself to the continuation of UN sanctions understanding that they would become a “paper tiger” regardless of continued US resolve to maintain them.
• Saddam circumvented the OFF program by means of “Protocols” or government-to-government economic trade agreements outside the purview of the UN. The successful implementation of the Protocols, continued oil smuggling efforts, and the manipulation of UN OFF contracts emboldened Saddam to pursue his military reconstitution efforts starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001.
• Once money began to flow into Iraq, the Regime devised and implemented methods and techniques to procure illicit goods from foreign suppliers.
• The Regime’s revenue streams amassed more that $11 billion from the early 1990s to 2030 outside the UN-approved methods.

1991 Desert Storm & UN sanctions destroyed Saddam’s missiles

Key Findings: Delivery Systems
• Since the early 1970s, Iraq has consistently sought to acquire an effective long-range weapons delivery capability. The Soviet Union was a key supplier.
• Desert Storm and subsequent UN resolutions and inspections brought many of Iraq’s delivery system programs to a halt. While much of Iraq’s long-range missile inventory and production infrastructure was eliminated, Iraq until late 1991 kept some items hidden to assist future reconstitution of the force.
• It appears to have taken time, but Iraq eventually realized that sanctions were not going to end quickly. This forced Iraq to sacrifice its long-range delivery force in an attempt to bring about a quick end to the sanctions.
• The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has uncovered no evidence Iraq retained Scud-variant missiles, and debriefings of Iraqi officials in addition to some documentation suggest that Iraq did not retain such missiles after 1991.

Saddam’s nuclear program decayed after Desert Storm

Key Findings: Nuclear
• Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.
• Nevertheless, after 1991, Saddam did express his intent to retain the intellectual capital developed during the Iraqi Nuclear Program. Senior Iraqis-several of them from the Regime’s inner circle-told ISG they assumed Saddam would restart a nuclear program once UN sanctions ended.
• Baghdad undertook a variety of measures to conceal key elements of its nuclear program from successive UN inspectors, including specific direction by Saddam Husayn to hide and preserve documentation associated with Iraq’s nuclear program.
• As with other WMD areas, Saddam’s ambitions in the nuclear area were secondary to his prime objective of ending UN sanctions.

Saddam wanted chemical weapons but industry was destroyed

Key Findings: Chemical
• Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a Chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted and conditions were judged favorable.
• While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, Iraq Survey Group (ISG) judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991.
• Iraq’s CW program was crippled by the Gulf war and the legitimate chemical industry, which suffered under sanctions, only began to recover in the mid-1990s. Subsequent changes in the management of key military and civilian organizations, followed by an influx of funding and resources, provided Iraq with the ability to reinvigorate its industrial base.
• ISG found no credible evidence that any field elements knew about plans for CW use during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Saddam had biological weapons capability but no weapons

Key Findings: Biological
• In 1991, Saddam Husayn regarded Biological Weapons (BW) as an integral element of his arsenal, and would have used it if the need arose.
• Iraq Survey Group (ISG) judges that Iraq’s actions between 1991 and 1996 demonstrate that the state intended to preserve its BW capability and return to a steady, methodical progress toward a mature BW program when and if the opportunity arose.
• ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes.
• Iraq would have faced great difficulty in re-establishing an effective BW agent production capability. Nevertheless, after 1996 Iraq still had a significant dual-use capability- some declared-readily useful for BW if the Regime chose to use it.
• ISG judges that in 1991 and 1992, Iraq appears to have destroyed its undeclared stocks of BW weapons. However ISG lacks evidence to document complete destruction.

Extend international order friendly to our security.

Conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests? Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:

1. we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
2. we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
3. we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
4. we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.