Home » Usa, Donald Rumsfeld died. He was the architect of the war on Iraq

Usa, Donald Rumsfeld died. He was the architect of the war on Iraq

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New York – Donald Rumsfeld, who is remembered above all for his role in a senseless adventure, died at the age of 88: as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, he was the one who managed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That design had matured as a reaction to the September 11, 2001 attack, on the basis of a lie, the accusation that Saddam Hussein was an accomplice of Al Qaeda, and had weapons of mass destruction, both false. As one of the directors of “regime change”, the plan to export democracy with military aggression, and to redo the geopolitics of the Middle East, was improperly cataloged among the “neocons”. In reality he belonged to a different school, the old technocratic, capitalist and imperialist right, which had an opportunist alliance with the real “neocons”.

Rumsfeld came from afar, his career had been twin to that of his friend and ally Dick Cheney, vice president of Bush Junior: both had started serving in the Republican party at the time of Richard Nixon, and working in the administration of Ronald Reagan . In between, Rumsfeld had been Gerald Ford’s youngest secretary of defense; with Bush Junior he would have been the eldest, and also the only one to hold that position twice. Bush dismissed it after three and a half years, when the war in Iraq had proved a quagmire, not the quiet walk to triumph that Rumsfeld had foreseen.

Rumsfeld’s verbal creativity is remembered. It was he who coined the expression “old Europe versus new Europe”, to distinguish between anti-Americans like France and Germany (opposed to the invasion of Iraq) and Eastern European countries more recently admitted to NATO, aligned with Washington’s foreign policy. His press conferences during the second Gulf War remain memorable, when he invented phrases such as “sometimes shit happens” (the best plans can go wrong) or “there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”.

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As a proponent of an imperial strategy, he could not recognize himself in Donald Trump’s isolationism and in fact on January 4, 2021 he signed an anti-Trump appeal with various other former defense secretaries, Republicans and Democrats, to denounce Trump’s temptation to use forces armed in domestic politics in order to reverse its electoral defeat. On that occasion Rumsfeld like most of the traditional right had sided in defense of the institutions against a leader who was ready to storm them in order to keep power.

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