Donald Rumsfeld's dirty laundry (Guardian)

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New revelations about the former US defence secretary show him to be an even bigger disaster than you thought
o Matthew Duss
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 May 2009 21.00 BST


Donald Rumsfeld's dirty laundry

New revelations about the former US defence secretary show him to be an even bigger disaster than you thought
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* matthew duss
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o Matthew Duss
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 May 2009 21.00 BST

For those who've been paying attention to the Iraq war, the managerial incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld is no secret. In his memoir of his year in Iraq, former US proconsul Paul Bremer reports numerous maddening incidences of Rumsfeld's mercurial intransigence and micromanaging as he oversaw Iraq's descent into insurgency in the early days of the US occupation.

Stanford scholar and US occupation adviser Larry Diamond, whose book Squandered Victory documents numerous missteps in the US attempt to reconstruct the shattered Iraqi state, told Foreign Policy magazine in 2006: "I think history will skewer Donald Rumsfeld," calling him "on balance one of the most disastrous secretaries of defense since the position was created after World War II."

An astonishing new GQ piece by Robert Draper, also the author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush, goes even further into Rumsfeld's bad habits. Among the article's revelations: Rumsfeld held up deploying US troops to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans for five days after the hurricane hit. Rumsfeld had a, shall we say, rather old-fashioned attitude toward his female colleagues. And a number of the Pentagon's Worldwide Intelligence Updates, often delivered by Rumsfeld by hand to the president, featured inspirational Bible verses – apparently to appeal to the president's own devout Christianity, which Rumsfeld himself apparently does not share.

It says a heck of a lot, of course, that so many of Rumsfeld's former colleagues were willing to air so much dirty laundry. Lamely trying to defend Rumsfeld in a Green Room interview after ABC's This Week, Liz Cheney – whose father Dick Cheney was Rumsfeld's protégé in the Ford administration, and later his key ally in Bush's – lamented the "piling on of secretary Rumsfeld that we've seen in the liberal media". Co-panelist James Carville reminded her that Draper had been given unprecedented access to the Bush White House, certainly not something that the notoriously secretive administration was likely to do for some leftwing hack ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/19/donald-rumsfeld-gq-bush-cheney