Life and times of Donald Rumsfeld : Is there a lesson for India ?

Quotes and remarks from Donald Rumsfeld would leave everyone wondering !

Here are two samples: "If you are not criticised, you may not be doing much”.
and -- “If it were a fact, it would not be called intelligence”. 

New Delhi: It could be erroneous to forget the life and times of Donald Rumsfeld, the one-time US Secretary of State, as a passing phase. 

It is imperative from strategic view points as Rumsfeld represented a mindset typical of those who rule and most of the times forget what adverse fallout they are leaving behind.

Rumsfeld’s legacy is also important for a country like India which has inched closer to the US and also vice versa since the time of Rumsfeld. Is it a worthy decision to trust Americans beyond a point?

Rumsfeld would be remembered in the realm of foreign policy making and strategic studies for the Iraq war and his ‘documented’ orders for unprecedented tortures which later even left the Americans red-faced.

Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University says all obits on Rumsfeld, who died at the age of 88, should commence with a reference it was none other than Rumsfeld who “gave the orders” for torture US prisoners in US custody in Iraq, Gauntanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

It was also stated once that Rumsfeld himself was the ‘real’ weapon of mass destruction in the Gulf. 

In 2003, the then Bush administration had okayed bombing of Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein was building the weapon of mass destruction which later the Americans could not really prove.

However, Rumsfeld was an unrepentant protagonist of history. 
“...the road not traveled always looks smoother, the cold reality of a Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad most likely would mean a Middle East far more perilous than it is today”.

In his book ‘Known and Unknown: A Memoir’ published in 2011, Rumsfeld interestingly had a classic one liner for the likes of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton – “You would not want to be in a foxhole with them”.

In 2020 in the run up to the Presidential elections, Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate said that his ‘vote’ for the Iraq War was a ‘mistake’. He further said, the then Bush administration had “no concrete proof of what he was doing, and they still went to war”.

The Iraq War was admittedly a major blunder among American policies and today if the US is forced to sheepishly find an exit route from Afghanistan, all of it could be directly or indirectly linked to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The war had a price tag of 6.4 trillion dollars on Washington and it claimed 8 lakh lives and displaced about 37 million people.

At a later stage, Rumsfeld was again with his one-liner: “Some things work out, some things don’t”.

In retrospect, analysts now say, Rumsfeld and his President George W Bush are linked and responsible for creating a ‘defiant’ Iran and also giving the world a disastrous and ugly face of Islamic terror called ISIS.

The end of Saddam Hussein created a vacuum obviously and that propped up Shiite Islamist militia and also led Iran ‘take advantage’ of the situation.

The worst was the ‘torture’ order which affected the US ‘image and credibility’ across the globe.

Unfortunately, however, the US still has around 2500 troops in the Iraq region fighting ISIS.

The torture memo signed by Rumsfeld on Feb 2, 2002 had said the US soldiers could torture those held for ’20-hour interrogations, removal of clothes and the use of phobias’.
But while analysing all these more from New Delhi’s perspective, will it be in the fitness of things to say that while Rumsfeld was singularly bad, all that Americans did during that period and the US administration itself is all good ?

In effect Rumsfeld represented a mindset of the time. A Harris Poll in November 2001 – of course before the 2003 Iraq invasion – had given him an approval rating of 78 per cent. 
And a little known fact is he was once a Presidential candidate also in the year 1996.
Closer analysis reveals that Operation Iraqi Freedom, the initial phase of US engagements in that region, was successful.
Had Rumsfeld retired around that time, he would be credited for all kinds of glories in military and strategic terms.
But he continued in office and thus the subsequent ‘bad things’ caught up with him.
Once a date was fixed for US withdrawal from Iraq, President Bush was ‘advised’ against the move. 
The ‘liberators’ soon became American occupation force and this marked the start of the insurgency. 
‘Experts’ from the ousted Saddam Hussein regime were fired resulting in further chaos in the affairs of Iraq.
The decline had begun. The same Harris Poll, according to a report in ‘USA Today’, gave Rumsfeld a 47 per cent in 2003 and 
in November 2005, Rumsfeld’s popularity came down to a poor 34.
Is he that way a scapegoat of the rest of the Bush administration?
It is said a nation should not go to war unless you are prepared to win it. Plunging into Afghanistan once the 
Americans had withdrawn will be a decisive turning point in India’s role ‘at the global scale’.
But we should be more careful as the Americans are known for making mistakes and leaving behind gory legacies as well.
The Vietnam War was a major self-inflicted injury by the US and was Afghanistan to and extent and also the 
Iraq War.

Tail piece:

Dumsfeld’s one-liners would make delicious reading and also are thought provoking.

Here are a few examples:

“...Stuff happens” – Rumsfeld had said after reports that US troops had looted the museum in Baghdad
“I made a few misstatements” – on locations of Saddam Hussein’s alleged centres of ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war” – on large scale killings in Afghanistan

## Once he also tried to shut down critics saying – “If you are not criticised, you may not be doing much”.

He did not  surprise friends and foes and remarked: “If it were a fact, it would not be called intelligence”. 

ends