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Donald Rumsfeld |
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After serving as Republican Congressman through the turbulent sixties, Rumsfeld served Richard Nixon first as economic advisor and then as ambassador to NATO (1969 - 1973). When the Nixon administration folded (like a house of cards), he served Gerald Ford as Chief-of-Staff and Defense Secretary. During his brief tenure as Defense Secretary, he managed to shepherd into production an impressive array of weapons of mass destruction, including the MX missile, the Trident submarine and the B-1 bomber. As the Ford administration gave way to the less fertile fields of the Carter administration, Rumsfeld used his wide-ranging management experience to return to the private sector, landing a number of high paying jobs in pharmaceuticals and technology. At the same time, he continued to serve in a variety of government posts - bearing nearly a dozen titles between 1982 to 2000, even as his bank account swelled from the fabulous growth of the drug industry and the high-tech sector. His career as a public figure soared during the Reagan administration, when he was appointed Special Peace Envoy to the Middle East. This was where he met his soon-to-be friend and ally, Saddam Hussein. When the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, Rumsfeld payed the first of several visits to Baghdad, during which he told Iraqi officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major strategic defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, Rumsfeld told the Butcher of Baghdad that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq. Rumsfeld later claimed that the purpose of this meeting was to warn Hussein to abandon the use of banned weapons - but that lofty goal is not reflected in the State Department's records from the meeting. When the State Department declared that Iraq's victory in this war was in the best interests of regional stability, Rumsfeld was personally charged with giving Iraq the means to make that victory happen. Shortly thereafter, intelligence reports began to indicate that the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran "almost daily." Following this historic encounter, a great boom in business between the U.S. and Iraq began. U.S. companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush Sr.. Shipments to Saddam included sample strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin. (Remember pharmaceuticals were Rumsfeld's bread and butter at this point. And business is business, after all.) Other shipments included helicopter gunships and military trainers charged with teaching Iraqi troops how to operate them. According to a February 13, 1991 Los Angeles Times article: "[Saddam Hussein] bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little notice. A second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition in August, 1983... Nonetheless, the sale was approved." Five years later, in 1988, Saddam's notorious chemical attacks against Kurdish civilians began. Iraqi forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from helicopters and planes. According to U.S. intelligence sources "the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs." Under Clinton, Rumsfeld, master of mass destruction, was the man tapped to oversee work on Star Wars, the national missile defense system. At the same time, he goaded Clinton on to continue Bush Senior's crusade against Saddam. In one instance, he signed on to an "open letter" to President Clinton, calling on him to eliminate "the threat posed by Saddam." It urged Clinton to "provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world from the scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish." So, when Bush Jr. gave him a second day in the sun as Secretary of Defense, it was no surprise that he would continue the campaign against his former ally, who by then, was Public Enemy Number One. After September 11, when he reportedly appeared on site at the Pentagon to drag his wounded comrades from the wreckage, he earned his laurels by ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan (the disappearance of Osama bin Laden notwithstanding). It was here that he firmly established what is known as the "Rumsfeld strategem" - an under-the-radar pre-invasion invasion to soften up the target that makes the official media sanctioned invasion look like a cakewalk. (A sort of pre-pre-emptive strike, if you will.) By moving air power and ground troops into Afghanistan well before the "official" war began, Rumsfeld managed the spectacle of a six-month war that looked like it only took two months. Of course, the recipe worked wonders in Iraq, where a decade of
bombing allowed the U.S. to topple one of the world's most dangerous
regimes, one armed to the teeth with chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons, in a matter of weeks. For additional articles, see: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/press.htm |
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