OBITUARY DONALD RUMSFELD :9 July 1932,-- June 29, 2021,

Architect of Iraq war

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Sandeep Dixit

Two-time US Defence Secretary and a Gerald Ford protégée, Donald Rumsfeld died on Thursday at the age of 89.

History will record Rumsfeld as having led the US into two brutal wars in Asia rather than failing to become the President of the United States which many thought he was more suited to than George Bush Senior.

Having served in the US military and then winning four terms in the House of Congress with big margins, Rumsfeld was among the Young Turks who promoted Gerald Ford as the President. That was the first time he entered the below decks of the US establishment as the Chief of Staff to the US President and never looked back.

Despite holding an impressive series of insider administrative posts and then turning around a couple of ailing pharmaceutical companies, besides a high-end electrical behemoth, he will unfortunately be remembered for fabricating evidence that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction and needed to be removed.

Having masterminded the invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier in 2001, it was under his watch as the Defence Secretary that secret prisons sprang up in countries with scant respect for human rights. The US forces brought blindfolded prisoners from Afghanistan and then Iraq to these holding pens before being dumped in the infamous Guantanamo Bay, a piece of Cuban land held by the US.

A Middle East envoy of the US President and having held several crucial posts that impacted on the region, Rumsfeld was not uninformed about Iraq. Nor was Saddam Hussein a stranger to him. After all, the 80s was the time when the Iraqi Embassy on the Potomac hosted the most sought after parties on the diplomatic circuit in Washington. Rumsfeld had also met Hussein.

So, it has been somewhat of a mystery why Rumsfeld went all out for Saddam by making up evidence and then passionately defending it when investigating journalists raked up huge inconsistencies between his assertions and the truth.

While the world will decry him for the Iraq war, Rumsfeld should be held more accountable for the Afghan war whose consequences this region, including India, faces to this day and will have to endure many more years of instability.

Led by Rumsfeld, the US Deep State rejected offers by emissaries for the extradition of Bin-Laden and his gang from Kandahar in 2001. He instead opted for a war that has so far killed and maimed countless innocent Afghans with no end in sight.

Rumsfeld had played many a pivotal role in the hurly burly of American politics. His business turnaround abilities were no less. Perhaps the quote by Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was apt in his moment of passing away: “the evil that men do is remembered after their deaths, but the good is often buried with them”.