On Donald Rumsfeld / The Times 30.6.21

As US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was known for his bons mots. “Stuff happens,” he quipped. Or: “If you’re not criticised, you’re not doing your job.” Or, most famously: “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns — that is to say, we know there are some things we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

On Rumsfeld’s watch stuff most definitely did happen — the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the bloody, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he suffered such intense criticism after being tripped by “unknown unknowns” in Iraq that after six tumultuous years at the Pentagon, President George W Bush was finally compelled to dismiss him. By then he had become a deeply unpopular and largely discredited figure.

Rumsfeld was a principal architect of the calamitous US invasion that plunged Iraq into a civil war from which it has yet to recover, that cost trillions of dollars, and that caused the deaths of 4,500 US soldiers and, it is thought, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Far from crushing international terrorism after September 11, 2001, the US occupation fomented it, making America more of a target while undermining its global stature.

With the possible exception of Richard Cheney, vice-president to George W Bush, Rumsfeld was the most prominent of the so-called neo-conservatives who used the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington to argue not just for the destruction of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but for regime change in Iraq.

He wrongly insisted that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. He failed adequately to plan for Iraq’s reconstruction after Saddam’s removal, or to commit enough troops to restore law and order. On his watch US soldiers abused Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib, and terrorist suspects were tortured in Guantanamo Bay.

But unlike Robert McNamara, who served as defence secretary to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War, Rumsfeld showed little regret or remorse. In his memoirs (published before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011) he wrote that leaving Saddam in power would have meant “a Middle East far more perilous than it is today: Iran and Iraq locked in a struggle to field nuclear weapons, which could give rise to a regional arms race among Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria; continued support for terrorists from an Iraqi regime enriched by rising oil prices; wars of aggression launched against neighbouring countries in the Gulf; the torture and death of thousands more Iraqis suspected of opposing the regime; and a United Nations even more discredited than it is today, as its sanctions crumbled.

“Our failure to confront Iraq would have sent a message that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.”

“Rummy” had an illustrious career. He served in Congress and worked for four Republican presidents. At different times he was both the youngest and oldest defence secretary. He made a fortune in private business, was aggressive, brusque and a ruthless bureaucratic infighter who gained many enemies, but he was also tireless, cerebral and witty, with a boyish charm and infectious smile. For all that, his legacy is inevitably the Iraq conflict.

Donald Henry Rumsfeld was born in Chicago in 1932, the son of a real estate salesman, and raised in the affluent northern suburb of Winnetka. He became an Eagle Scout at high school and won a scholarship to Princeton. There he studied politics and captained the wrestling team. Before enlisting for three years as an aviator in the US Navy, he married his high-school sweetheart, Joyce Pierson. They would go on to have three children, Marcy, Valerie and Nick, who would later struggle with drug addiction.

After leaving the navy he worked in Washington for two Republican congressmen, then joined an investment banking firm in Chicago. When his local congresswoman stood down he cheekily joined the race to succeed her. He was 29, his campaign staff consisted of friends and family, and nobody gave him a chance, but he won.

Back in Washington he immediately made waves by corralling other newly elected Republican congressmen to replace the chairman of the Republican Conference with a Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford. “You could tell right away he was a champion wrestler . . . by the way he walked and the way he played politics,” a colleague said. “Very aggressive, very smart, very tough.”

By 1968 he had been re-elected three times and was restless. He joined Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign and kept the candidate updated as riots erupted outside that year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

After winning the White House, Nixon appointed Rumsfeld head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), an agency that President Johnson had created to fight poverty and that Rumsfeld had previously opposed. He hired a young congressional intern named Richard Cheney as his executive assistant, cut programmes that did not work and turned the OEO into a very effective body.

In 1971 Nixon made Rumsfeld his special adviser, calling him a “ruthless little bastard”, but Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, disliked him and in 1972 Nixon dispatched him to Brussels as US ambassador to Nato. That turned out to be fortuitous because it meant Rumsfeld escaped untainted when the full fury of the Watergate scandal broke. Nixon resigned. Ford replaced him, and duly summoned his former supporter back from Belgium to be his White House chief of staff.

Rumsfeld was in the Oval Office as the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon in April 1975. “It was a day no one involved will ever forget,” he said. He was at Ford’s side when the president survived an assassination attempt in San Francisco that September. The following month he was widely suspected of orchestrating the “Halloween massacre”, which greatly enhanced his stature. Ford stripped Rumsfeld’s rival Henry Kissinger of the job of national security adviser, sidelined George Bush Sr, another of Rumsfeld’s rivals, at the CIA, and appointed Rumsfeld defence secretary at the age of 43. Cheney, Rumsfeld’s friend and ally, succeeded him as White House chief of staff.

Rumsfeld inherited a Pentagon dispirited by defeat in Vietnam and with Kissinger, who remained secretary of state, pursuing detente with the Soviet Union. He set out to rebuild the US military, and secure more money from Congress, by playing up the Soviet threat and undermining Kissinger’s disarmament negotiations. Kissinger called him the most ruthless man he ever met, adding that he was “a skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly”.

After Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976 Rumsfeld returned to Chicago to become chief executive of a struggling pharmaceutical company, GD Searle. He transformed its fortunes before moving to General Instrument Corporation, an electronics manufacturer that pioneered high-definition television technology, and later another pharmaceutical company.

In 1980 Rumsfeld was touted as a possible running-mate for Ronald Reagan, but the former California governor chose his old rival, George Bush Sr, and Rumsfeld stayed in the lucrative private sector.

Three years later terrorists bombed a US marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans, and Reagan appointed Rumsfeld his special envoy to the Middle East. That December, as he criss-crossed a region he dubbed “The Swamp”, he met Saddam at one of his Baghdad palaces.

Iraq was at war with Iran. Saddam had used nerve gas. The US knew he was a butcher, but considered him a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists who had seized power in Tehran. A blurry photograph of Rumsfeld smiling and shaking Saddam’s hand inevitably returned to haunt him when the US invaded Iraq 20 years later.

Rumsfeld briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 but struggled to raise funds and withdrew before the primaries began. He remained in the private sector during George Bush Sr’s presidency, but took on various governmental assignments and was active in Republican circles.

He led a commission to assess the ballistic missile threat for President Clinton. He chaired Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. He was one of 18 prominent hawks who signed a 1998 letter from the Project for a New American Century demanding Saddam’s removal.

In 2000 he served as a foreign policy adviser to George W Bush’s victorious presidential campaign, and was rewarded with his second stint as defence secretary on Cheney’s recommendation. He was seen as a hawkish counterweight to Colin Powell, Bush’s much more moderate secretary of state.

Rumsfeld took office determined to transform the US military from a Cold War behemoth into a much smaller and nimbler body backed by the latest technology and prepared for the unexpected. Working while standing up at a lectern in his office, he fired off endless orders and questions that came to be known as “snowflakes”. He infuriated the generals, but then the unexpected did strike.

On September 11 two hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York. A third crashed into the Pentagon as Rumsfeld was watching the carnage in New York. He escaped unhurt, briefly helped the rescue effort, then returned to the building’s command centre to help to co-ordinate the administration’s response.

From the outset Cheney, Rumsfeld, his Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and other neo-conservatives argued that the US should use 9/11 as a pretext for removing Saddam as well as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harboured Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

They argued that in the post-9/11 world the US should pre-emptively eliminate threats of the sort posed by Saddam’s WMD programme — a strategy later dubbed the “Bush Doctrine”. Rumsfeld said: “Defending against terrorism and other emerging 21st-century threats requires that we take the war to the enemy. The best and in some cases the only defence is a good offence.”

The US offensive against the Taliban began a month after 9/11 and proved, at least initially, a triumph for Rumsfeld’s use of streamlined force. Within weeks Kabul was occupied, the Taliban largely defeated and al-Qaeda on the run. Rumsfeld became a media star as he jousted with journalists and dispensed his wit and wisdom at daily press conferences.

Even as the war in Afghanistan raged he and his fellow hawks persuaded Bush of the need to remove Saddam despite the robust opposition of Powell and various transatlantic allies whom he dismissed as “old Europe”.

The neo-conservatives linked Saddam to the 9/11 attacks, and insisted that he was developing WMD, despite a lack of hard evidence to support either contention. When a journalist asked how he knew that Saddam had WMD or links to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld retorted sarcastically: “Was Abraham Lincoln short?”.

Rumsfeld overruled his generals’ plan to invade Iraq with half a million troops, insisting on a US force of barely 140,000, and again he was initially vindicated. A “shock and awe” bombing campaign began in March 2003, and the invasion force had seized Baghdad within a month. Then Rumsfeld’s luck ran out. No WMD were found — “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he argued.

Iraqis went on a looting spree as US troops looked on. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld remarked. “Freedom is untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things and that’s what’s going to happen here.”

He was wrong. The occupying force had no viable plan for rebuilding Iraq or restoring Iraqi rule, and it was too small to maintain order. It disbanded the predominantly Sunni Iraqi army, leaving 400,000 men jobless and resentful. A Sunni insurgency gained momentum. So did a vicious sectarian war between Sunnis and Shias.

The US death toll climbed rapidly as its forces were killed by improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers, and the more they fought back the more they fuelled the insurgency. A conflict that Rumsfeld had insisted would last no longer than five months dragged on and on. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the Taliban were resurgent.

In 2004 Rumsfeld’s stock took another beating when it was revealed that he used a machine to replicate his signature on condolence letters to the families of slain soldiers. Then shocking photographs emerged of US soldiers sadistically abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib — the same prison where Saddam tortured dissidents. Rumsfeld twice offered to resign, but Bush kept him on.

Controversy was also growing over the indefinite detention without trial of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and various “black sites” around the world, and the use by the US military and CIA of extreme interrogation techniques including waterboarding, deafening noise, extreme temperatures, light and sleep deprivation, hooding and stress positions.

Rumsfeld argued that terrorist suspects were not prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Convention protections. What he called “enhanced interrogation techniques” human rights organisations called torture. “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?,” he scribbled on a memorandum authorising the harsh interrogation methods.

By 2006 public support for the war had plummeted. Six retired generals called on Rumsfeld to resign over his “abysmal” management of it. That November the Democrats seized control of Congress and Bush had little choice to remove him. After six turbulent years at the Pentagon Rumsfeld, by then 74, sent its staff a final memo entitled “Snowflakes — the Blizzard is Over”.

The Republican senator John McCain called Rumsfeld “one of the worst secretaries of defence in history”. George Bush Sr said he had “served [his son] badly . . .I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything.”

Rumsfeld in retirement kept a relatively low profile, but continued to defend his record in occasional interviews and an autobiography entitled Known and Unknown the proceeds of which he donated to veterans’ charities.

“Ridding the region of Saddam’s brutal regime has created a more stable and secure world,” he asserted in a book that was widely seen as an exercise in shifting blame for the catastrophe of Iraq to the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council — indeed almost anyone but himself.