Many, many people over the past 12 years have argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake, but then last weekend Donald Rumsfeld said it, too — or seemed to, according to a headline in the Times of London: “Bush was wrong on Iraq, Rumsfeld says.”
Say what? One of the architects of the war, one of George W. Bush’s right-hand men, the guy who was talking about regime change even before Sept. 11 and the faulty intelligence of WMD — he’s saying it was all wrong, and that he thought so at the time? From the Times story:
“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories. . . 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.”
Not surprisingly, the prickly former secretary of Defense now tells The Washington Post he is unhappy with the headline’s “inaccurate” characterization. He also thinks the article itself is “not consistent with the interview,” which took place in the D.C. offices of his education foundation.
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“My comments were consistently much more subtle,” Rumsfeld said on the phone Tuesday, “and the article in the London Times was really ridiculous.”
[Cartoonist Ann Telnaes on Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraq war dance]
Rumsfeld, subtle? The man known for conducting his Pentagon briefings like a circus ringmaster, for walking a tight-rope of semantics, for wriggling free from tough questions like Houdini, for —
“Do you have the full interview? No?” Rumsfeld says. “I have it.”
He tapes all of his interviews, for his own records. Not surprising. This is the man whose professional partner was a Dictaphone, who was known for issuing thousands of office memos while at the Pentagon (so many that people called them “snowflakes”). He then proceeds to read the full quote from the interview, in his trademark tone of goodness-gracious incredulity, and it is vintage Rumsfeld: firm but tangled, curt but expansive. Deep breath:
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“I guess I’m kind of in the minority. I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their history, nor has it been appropriate for us at every moment of our history. We have evolved, we’re still evolving, and we’ll be different in 50 years. A hundred years ago, women didn’t vote. A hundred fifty years ago, we had slaves and so forth. So, the idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq, it seemed to me, is unrealistic to a certain extent, and the President and the administration would have been better off not allowing the mission to creep that direction. I was concerned about it when I first heard the beginnings of those words. I’m for democracy, whatever that means, but it means different things at different times and different places. And I have a healthy respect for what we’re not capable of doing, and that’s nation-building, and I think that a different country with different neighbors and a different culture… culture is so important… ought to be different, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s probably a good thing for the world if people are different and have different approaches. You say what might you have done differently? I personally think that Allawi would have been a whale of a lot different than Maliki. Well, why? Because he was a Shia, but he was Ba’athist. He was tough. They tried to kill him; Saddam tried to kill him. I think he had a clearer understanding that for that country to hold together, you have got to be respectful of the Kurds and the Shia and the Sunnis, all, and not think that you can run off with the football. So, always, you would do things differently, and I was unhappy when I saw things migrating over to that direction.”
Maybe not subtle, but at least more interesting than the headline in the Times of London (and more exact than the clipped quotation that was used).
Also, more entertaining: “I’m for democracy, whatever that means.” What a quote, albeit an abridged one.
Share this articleShareTaking things out of context, or misrepresenting the intended meaning of something, is a cardinal sin in the mind of Donald Rumsfeld, whose snowflakes often requested the dictionary definition of certain terms: “scapegoat,” “guerrilla warfare,” “insurgency,” even the word “several.” This is a man who values precision, which is why the headline made a stir in the first place. Was Rumsfeld admitting to an “unknown known,” which can be defined either as 1) that which you think you know but actually don’t or 2) that which you don’t know that you know?
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Former secretaries of Defense like to raise hell in their retirement, sometimes at the expense of their commander-in-chief. The memoirs of Robert Gates and Leon Panetta second-guessed President Obama’s strategic choices in the Middle East and Afghanistan. In his twilight years, Robert McNamara wrote that “we were wrong, terribly wrong” in Vietnam, a war he found futile even while running it from the Pentagon.
[Profile: An hour with Robert Gates, a man still at war]
Rumsfeld isn’t really doing any of this. He isn’t admitting failure, though in his memoir he said that he and his colleagues were wrong about WMD. He isn’t saying that Bush’s choices were incorrect, though he voiced his concerns to the president about rushing democracy as early as May 2003, according to the memoir. “Our particular template of democracy” is distinct from democracy with a capital D, the general kind that peppered Bush’s rhetoric, and “we’re still evolving” is a bit of a departure from Rumsfeld’s typical certainty and recalcitrance. But only at first glance. Rumsfeld, capable of parsing a question to smithereens, also has a healthy respect for the unanticipated, the scenario that has yet to be imagined, the unknown. His greatest fear, he told filmmaker Errol Morris in the documentary “The Unknown Known,” is the failure to imagine worst-case scenarios.
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The known? “What I said from the beginning was the goal in Iraq is to have Saddam Hussein gone,” Rumsfeld says on the phone. “To have leadership in the country that would not invade its neighbors, that would not have WMD and that would be reasonably respectful of the various diverse ethnic elements in the country.”
Installing a democracy in our image? No. But to really parse this out, Rumsfeld-style, we must turn to the snowflakes.
A July 2001 snowflake: “If Saddam’s regime were ousted, we’d have a much improved position in the region and elsewhere.”
A July 2002 snowflake: “Organizing the democratic opposition groups that we favor into a real political-military force is essential to… avoid a political vacuum, and avoid a chaotic post-Saddam free-for-all.”
A May 2003 snowflake: “…we need to lay a foundation for self-government.”
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In June 2004, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad was handing over the job of governing to three tiers of Iraqi councils — a particular template of democracy sketched out by the United States. As former Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote on June 22, 2004, from Baghdad: “‘Will this develop the way we hope it will?’ a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. ‘Probably not.'”
A snowflake to President Bush that same month: “We are on the right course.”
That course, of course, turned out to be the worst-case scenario.
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