大象传媒

At 78, age has not mellowed him.

As Donald Rumsfeld embarks on a series of TV interviews to promote his book, , he鈥檚 aggressively defending not just the Iraq War, but how he handled it.

It is a "known known" that self-justification is the very purpose of political memoirs.

The former US defence secretary is聽as brusque and sharp-tongued as ever. When he was in the Pentagon, some accused him of leadership through intimidation.

asked him if he terrified people. He replied that he asked questions and if people didn鈥檛 have the answers it 鈥渨asn鈥檛 fun for them鈥�. Mr Rumsfeld is now the one being asked some tough questions, but he seems to be having fun, not giving ground.

His final answer in this particular exchange, about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, echoes his which makes for the title of his book.

Rumsfeld: Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, the French intelligence, the British intelligence, the German intelligence, it was uniform across the board that it was reasonable to assume that he had chemical and biological weapons.

Sawyer: But you were wrong.

R: My goodness, the intelligence was certainly wrong.

S: If you had known he did not have them.

R: I didn't know.

S: If you had 鈥�

R: I didn't.

S: If you had

R: I have no idea. I have no idea. What you know today can help you on things you're thinking about tomorrow. It can't help you with things you were thinking about back then.

The rights and wrongs of the war aside, , of not planning for the aftermath of war . They accuse him of being ideologically bound to an unrealistically short war - a doctrine dependent on doing the job with as few troops as possible 鈥� and shying away from anything that smacked of nation building.

that he constantly raised questions about troop numbers and neither the president nor the generals thought any more were needed.

Indeed, in his book Mr Rumsfeld suggests he was one of the few people not to blame for anything that went wrong.

He said Condoleezza Rice tried to run things by committee and that there were too many leaks from聽Colin Powell's state department. There were 鈥渢oo many hands on the steering wheel鈥�, he writes. He says that聽long before the war began he had made a list which he聽called his聽鈥減arade of horribles鈥�.

He warned against weapons of mass destruction (WMD) not being found, ethnic strife and post Saddam efforts taking more than two to four years.

Mr Rumsfeld writes: 鈥淚 understood that if WMD were not found the administration鈥檚 credibility would be undermined... if we had had a full discussion of this possibility then, it might have made an important difference in the administration鈥檚 communication strategy.鈥�

But he says the National Security Council did not have the discussion and so the government never examined 鈥渁 broad enough spectrum of possibilities鈥�.

He does say that he should have insisted on resigning over the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He tried to do so twice, in hand-written notes to George W Bush, but they were rejected.

鈥淚 stepped up and told the president I thought I should resign. And I think probably he and the military and the Pentagon and the country would've been better off if I had."

But Mr Rumsfeld鈥檚 memoirs and interviews are on the whole a defence of the known path of the past against the unknowable alternatives urged by others, then and now.

One thing Mr Rumsfeld does not know is doubt.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?