All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio for Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and antiwar.com.
Introducing Andrew Coburn.
He's a writer and lecturer on defense and national affairs.
He's also the author of five non-fiction books.
He's written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic, among other publications.
He currently lives in Washington, D.C., and is the author of this excellent book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
This will be our follow-up interview to part one we did last week.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
Hi, glad to be with you again.
Yes, good to have you back on the show, sir.
The book is so good, and I wanted to talk about so much out of the book that we really didn't even get to talk about Iraq or transformation dogma or any of these kinds of things, so I'm really glad I have this opportunity to follow up with part two.
And if it's okay with you, I want to start this one actually in the same place we started last week, which is August of 2006.
George Bush is at his dad's house in Maine, and people should remember that he's from Connecticut.
He's not really a Texan, but he's up there with his father in Kennebunkport, and what happens?
Well, they go out for a walk, and the son says, Dad, can I ask you a question?
He says, yeah.
He says, what's a neocon?
And the father says, do you want names or a description?
And President Bush Jr. says, I'll take a description.
The father says, I'll give it to you in one word, Israel.
So from that we learn, well, a number of things.
We learn that George Bush had managed to get through five and a half years, or get to it and get into middle age, what a neocon was, and that the father thought the neocons were all about Israel.
Yeah.
Well, and really that's, you're right.
Okay.
First of all, Jr. somehow lasted through August of 2006 without so much as Googling the word neocon to find out what the hell all the rest of us were talking about.
Well, our president is not noted for his curiosity.
I mean, people say he's not, I don't know.
People keep saying, oh, he's not really dumb.
I'm always waiting for the evidence on that.
He seems to have a kind of a manipulative cunning, which I guess some people think stands in for smart, but I'm glad you mentioned that he's not from Texas.
He, you know, he's preppy from Greenwich, Connecticut, you know, Dixie Chicks would have stayed with him for a long trouble if they'd remembered that.
But anyway.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm tired of apologizing for the guy.
Yeah.
Well, there you go.
Cause I am from Texas.
Exactly.
A great state.
So, well, yeah, so yeah, he's just not very curious.
You know, he does, he makes, he takes pride in not reading the newspapers.
You know, he says he gets all his information from his, you know, from his, his coterie at court, you know, that would be, I don't know, Condoleezza Rice, you know, Cheney, Rumsfeld.
You know, let me ask you something.
Well, this has come up in the context of the guy who refused to be the war czar and wrote in the Washington Post that, well, it's because there's no connection between the tactics on the ground and the strategy in the long term.
And nobody up there has any idea where they're going at all.
And, and it, and I'm reminded of Bob Woodward's book where he writes about Andrew Card debating whether to replace Rumsfeld with James Baker.
And, and, you know, it's reading Woodward.
So what are you going to do?
You know, but, but in reading and it's a state of denial, the last one, in reading that book, you would, you would think that Andrew Card had no idea that there was some sort of factional difference or, or, you know, real strategic or belief system difference between James Baker and Donald Rumsfeld at all.
He was just thinking, well, Baker seems like a pretty qualified guy.
How about him?
Like these people have no idea about the things that you and I had talked about all the time.
Well, right.
But also you wouldn't want to take that a bit too seriously.
I mean, I mean, didn't really matter what Andrew Card thought, if indeed he did think that.
Andrew Card, all those people to Bush and to Cheney and to Rumsfeld, well, Rumsfeld as it was then anyway, these people were just the help, you know, I mean, Card and Bolton and all these sort of weenies around the White House.
I mean, Rumsfeld would treat Card with total self-contempt.
He would ring him up and he'd, you know, chew him out, say, you're the worst chief of staff in history.
You know, when I was chief of staff of the White House, I would have been ashamed to do that, make the screw-ups you're making.
I mean, just, he would go on like, I mean, I've, you know, I mean, I've, I've had a good account of someone who was from someone who was in the room in Card's office and could hear Rumsfeld was yelling so loud, you could hear him over the phone.
So these people would, I mean, no, they couldn't give two hoots what people like Card thought.
I mean, you know, all of them, you know, Gonzalez, Myers, they're all, they're all just, I mean, I mean, not to say they don't manipulate well, Rove can sort of manipulate Bush.
And Bush responds to that by, he'll sort of shout at Rove.
And on one occasion, I think he's been heard, seen to send Rove out to walk Barney the dog, but that's really to, you know, obscure the fact that he's actually doing what Rove told, you know, politically he's sort of manipulated by Rove.
But the big guys, I mean, Rove is still one of the big guys, you know, with Cheney and Rumsfeld.
And they were the people who, you know, you know, for years and years, things have changed a bit now since Rumsfeld went and Scooter Libby's headed for the jailhouse because Libby was like so important in keeping the Cheney shop organized.
So things have fallen apart a bit since then.
But they, you know, for years, these, you know, these three guys Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney just, you know, ran the world with, you know, disastrous consequences.
And it's one of the things I talk about in the book.
Now, when going back to Bush and his conversation with his father last summer, and his father's one word answer, Israel, that's the definition of a neocon, that's hardly a sufficient definition.
So what exactly is a neocon?
Well, I argue in the book, I go back to the, we're going back to the early Rumsfeld years again, but I, I, I give, not many people, in fact, very, very few people know how the neocons really got, how they become a big, potent political force, which was really the brainchild of a guy called Paul Knitzer, who was a crafty, rather sinister sort of insider who for years and years and years and years, I mean, from 1950 on, he was the guy who really, he did a lot to accelerate and the arm, you know, the Cold War arms race and keep it running at a high, high tempo.
And he made his life's work ready to, you know, to jack up the, keep the tensions high and the defense budget up.
And in the, in the early seventies or mid seventies, he had a real, you know, made a very interesting insight, fateful insight, which was he realized that if you put together the pro-Israel lobby, which was traditionally dovish on things that weren't to do with Israel I mean, like they were very dovish about Vietnam, if you put them together with the defense lobby, you know, the military industrial complex, then you'd have an amazingly powerful alliance.
And that's what he did.
He persuaded the Israelis, I mean, these Israel supporters, or this group of Israel supporters that, you know, a dollar for defense spent 10 cents for Israel.
And so it went, and that's really where the, that was the neocon, I know that very well.
And Rumsfeld made his alliance with these people and, you know, it's an alliance that really lasted until last year when the neo-cons realizing that their project had resulted in utter total disaster and they might, people might begin to notice who was responsible, were quick to say it was all Rumsfeld's fault and, you know, so it wasn't us, it was Rumsfeld just carried it out so badly and, you know, that's it and don't blame us.
Right.
Which is what they're still saying to this day.
Now, if there's one complaint I can make about this book, I think it's, there's very little about Rumsfeld's connection to Cheney after becoming Secretary of Defense again and through the Iraq war and that sort of thing.
Well, okay.
You know, I wanted to keep it in a short book that people could read in an evening, but you got me there.
But the, I mean, what can I say?
They're very, you know, they're close.
I mean, they were close.
You know, I think I talked about this last week, so I won't go and do it again.
But, you know, they had a, they had a falling out in the 80s, early 90s, I mean, late 80s when Cheney refused to help Rumsfeld's presidential bid and Rumsfeld went into a kind of snit for a while.
And that lasted even through the last few years?
No, no, no, no.
But they weren't, you know, they weren't these, I think that the bond, it's hard to sort of exactly grade it.
I mean, people who talk to Cheney, when Cheney, when they were looking for a Secretary of Defense and side on Rumsfeld, I've talked to people who talked to Cheney about Rumsfeld at that time.
This is late 2000.
And they said that, and I do talk about this in the book, they said that, you know, he was kind of dispassionate.
He wasn't saying, hey, I've got a great idea, I'm going to met my old buddy, Don, Secretary of Defense.
It was like a dispassionate conversation of what do you think of Don Rumsfeld?
You know, what do you think his pluses and minuses and things like that?
So they, I think it was, I think it was as they embarked on this great enterprise to, you know, reduce the Middle East out of chaos and all the other disastrous things they were doing.
I think the bond sort of deepened.
I mean, now they're next door neighbors.
Cheney had this place out on the Eastern Shore in St. Michael's in Maryland.
And then Rumsfeld bought the house next door.
And you don't buy the house next door to someone that you know, unless you figure you're on reasonably good terms with them.
So you think through the war, operationally, that they were working together, talking often and that sort of thing?
Yeah, talking often.
And then we'll see, the Lances, I mean, I want to digress for a second to talk about another connection between the, you know, that was going on from the White House, from the Defense Department, which was Wolfowitz, Paul Wolfowitz.
You know, he was very close to Cheney, close to Cheney's deputy, I mean, chief of staff of Scooter Libby, you know, I happen to know that he talked to him, had long conversations with Scooter Libby almost every night.
Right.
Karen Kitowski said that they would come up with some phony intelligence and say, I've got to get this over to Scooter.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Scooter, you know, Scooter was all part of the same gang.
But Cheney, I mean, the way it worked was that Cheney, in meetings, Cheney would never say much or, you know, big meetings, he would say, often say nothing at all.
But he would then have, you know, one on one meetings with Bush.
And he was always, you know, before a decision was made, you know, he would, Bush would talk to Cheney.
But I described this phenomenon, which was, you know, Rumsfeld would come into a meeting and they'd all decided to do, you know, embark on one particular cause of action.
And then, you know, Rumsfeld would say, well, I don't think that's a good idea, Mr. President, here's what we should do.
And within a couple of minutes, he'd have Bush agreeing with him.
I think he wouldn't have done that and it wouldn't have worked as often as it did if he didn't know ahead of time that he'd have Cheney's backing on that.
I mean, they were, they were, it was a one two alliance and they, you know, they really were the two guys who, you know, ran the world.
Well, and it's really interesting because you say in your book that Condoleezza Rice, who was at that time the national security advisor and Colin Powell, the secretary of state, that they had to use back channels through the National Security Council to spy on Donald Rumsfeld just to find out what the hell he was up to on any given day.
Well, that's right, because Rumsfeld, you know, Rumsfeld made it absolutely his business not to, he wanted to make sure he was the sole avenue of info, you know, conduit of information to Bush and was a source of his power.
So he, he would, he would go completely wild if he found people in the, in DOD giving information to the NSC, you know, to, to the White House staff or let alone the state department.
So that's why, you know, I, I kind of thought they were actually having to sort of basically hack into the Pentagon's computers to find out what, what on earth was going on, you know, and quite important things like when he was planning to call up the reserve and things like that, very important things.
So that was the level of, you know, that was the level of secrecy and the level of how dysfunctional this government is.
I, I should say, I mean, it's one interesting piece of information, which was, you know, the way the government, I mean, I was interested in the sense that the government's different parts of the government spy on each other.
One particularly potent weapon that Cheney had is that in Cheney's office, so I've been told, the staff there, they have the ability or have the ability to call up, to look into the computers of, of other people in the government.
They can look at their calendars.
So there you are, you know, assistant secretary of state Horton, and so when Cheney's office doesn't trust you, he wants to see what you're up to, who you're having lunch with, and they can look and look on your calendar, assuming you're stupid enough to keep it on your computer, and see that, aha, Horton is, you know, having lunch with Coburn.
So he better not trust Horton, you know, anyway.
Yeah, lunch with you would be reason enough to get on a shitless, I bet.
Yeah, well, whoever, anyway, I just pulled out there.
So they, that's, that's, so that's, so I think, I mean, I'm sure Rumsfeld kept Cheney informed of what he was doing.
You know, Cheney once made a joke, but I thought it was rather, you know, telling joke.
He said most people, when they look at me, see the vice president of the United States, and when Don Rumsfeld looks at me, he sees his former assistant.
Right.
So, you know, that was a very interesting relationship, you know, incredibly potent with, you know, potent in a wholly disastrous way.
Yeah.
Well, and there you go again, you keep mentioning, mentioning disaster and completely destroying the Middle East and all that.
So let's talk about that.
You write in your book that Donald Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq with 35,000 troops.
Doesn't sound to me like he thought Iraq was much of a threat before that war.
That's right.
He just thought, I mean, he just wanted to show, as far as I can figure out what he personally, Don Rumsfeld, the reason he signed on to the enterprise was that he thought this would confirm that he, Don Rumsfeld, was a military genius, as he thought, fondly believe and certainly told everyone, had been demonstrated in Afghanistan.
Right.
Which we talked about last week.
We talked about last week.
But he thought he could do, you know, Iraq will be just as easy, easier maybe, you know, it's all flat.
So you could use lots of tanks and you could just race to Baghdad, knock off Saddam, you know, hand power to a bunch of generals who would then execute Saddam and you'd leave.
I think that was sort of, so far as he thought it through at all, which was, you know, I'm not sure how much he did, but that was sort of what he had in mind.
And he just played it by ear from then, you know, and then what he really liked doing and the military said, Oh my God, you know, you need 400,000 men.
And then what he did, what he enjoyed doing, which was, you know, aggressively wearing them down, showing that he was in charge and, you know, the Joint Chiefs didn't know nothing.
And bullying Franks, who was, you know, who was a bully himself and bullying Franks into, you know, accepting the force they finally went with, which was somewhere in between.
But then they also, Wolfowitz, as I talk about in the book, Wolfowitz, you know, he was fully on board for this because he wanted to leave Iraq, well, I'm going to say he wanted, first of all, he wanted to leave Iraq clear for his friend Chalabi to take over, who'd promised all this good stuff, had promised the Israelis, you know, oil shipments from Iraq and, you know, made a lot of promises to a lot of people, including to Paul Wolfowitz and his friend Richard Pearl.
So, but if that didn't work, I think, and I alluded to this in the book, but I think, you know, Wolfowitz and his gang, the Neocons, they were just as happy to see Iraq destroyed, you know, in some ways, I think what's happened has been mission accomplished because, you know, it was a big, powerful Arab state, you know, as opposed to these little countries in the Gulf, which are like those sand pits, you know, this, you know, Iraq was a real formidable state with a culture and a history and an army and lots of money, potentially.
And then Saddam was giving $25,000 to the families of each of the families of suicide bombers.
And if the sanctions had been lifted, he would have been able to rebuild that state pretty quickly.
Yes, he would.
So, you know, so I think they were just as happy to see Iraq destroyed.
Well, let's dwell there for a moment.
You actually quote Anthony Zinni, who basically had Frank's job before Frank's did, was the head of CENTCOM, as saying that that's what he believed happened here, too, that they decided Plan B, if they can't have it their way with the Hashemite King or an Ahmed Chalabi, that just go ahead and obliterate the place.
Yeah, you know, it's, I mean, that's, I've talked to Zinni about this quite a bit.
And I said, did you have any indication, you know, that he said, no, it was just the impression he got from talking to them, but they didn't really care.
I do have an indication, which I talk about in the book, which was a very prominent Shia cleric, Majid al-Kowy, who was actually a friend of mine who came to Washington not long before the war, he lived in London, and he was from a one of the very sort of distinguished Shia, you know, Ayatollah family in Najaf, most of whom have been killed by the dam, in fact.
And he came to Washington just before the war and had talks with various people here.
They went back to London and said, well, among other people, he'd met, quote unquote, certain American Jews, which I think that's what he meant by neocons, who told him that preserving the unity of Iraq was no longer a priority of American policy, which he being a sort of Shia thought was just fine.
But, you know, it shows that people here were already thinking that, you know, it confirms that people here were not too unhappy with the idea of Iraq falling apart.
And, you know, David Woomser also wrote that, I believe back in 1997, that's the man who's now Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser, wrote that what we ought to consider doing here is expediting the chaotic collapse.
He said once the regime in Iraq is overthrown, that we'll have tribal and ethnic warfare, and that we ought to expedite that chaotic collapse in order that we can remake the future our way, etc. like that.
Yeah.
Although actually, that's been slightly misquoted, he was mostly talking about Syria there.
But I know that I'm familiar with the quote, you know, with the way it's been quoted.
I think it's what you're seeing.
But you go back to the original, he seems to be talking about Syria.
But anyway, yeah, I think, you know, they, you know, it goes back to T.E.
Lawrence of Arabia, who wrote in 1916 that the object of the exercise should be to, well, to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, as it was then, and reduce the whole area to a mosaic of small Arab states, none of which would be any threat to the British Empire, he meant, but also, actually, Israel, he was a very active, very convinced Zionist as well.
Anyway, but I don't want to take any, lug everyone back 100 years, but this idea is long standing.
Yeah.
Well, it may even be worth going back 100 years, you know, Greg Palast writes in his book on Madhouse that the, basically, I guess the American Rockefeller standard oil and English Rothschild interests that had developed oil in the Caspian fields in Russia, that they had a big meeting and drew a red line around the joint little pool of Iraq and Iranian oil.
Yeah, the Red Line Agreement Code, yeah.
Yeah, and agreed, we will not develop this oil, we will do everything we can to keep this off the market, and that that's been the policy since, I think, 23 or 25?
Yeah, something like that, yeah.
So that makes a lot of sense?
We're drifting a long way from present day Iraq, Scott, I just said to him.
Well, except that everybody's killing each other there, and no oil's getting to the market, and it seems to be working out for whether you're a neo-con or an oil man at this point.
Well, this is true, this is true.
As long as you're not an Iraqi, everything's great.
Yeah, no, I mean, Iraq, just want to remind people of the situation, and we now have the WHO conference going on at the moment, or yesterday's meeting, they confirmed 21% of Iraqi children are now acutely malnourished.
Think of that.
This was, you know, before the first Gulf War, the major pediatric, that's 1990, the major pediatric problem in Iraq, i.e. children's health problem, was obesity, they were eating too much.
Now, one in five is acutely malnourished.
So that, you know, when Bush talks about his legacy, I'd say that's a good candidate.
Well, there's another article I saw yesterday that said 70% of elementary school aged children in Iraq are suffering from major trauma and symptoms like stuttering and bedwetting and that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's all, you know, anyway.
Millions of lives ruined, that's all, it's just, you know.
Yeah, it's just awful beyond belief.
Yeah, and well, this is to the point in your book, too, that Iraq had already been destroyed by the United States of America long before 2003, there wasn't much left of this country to invade.
Right, we'd been bombing it for 12 years, you know, we'd destroyed the middle class.
You know, I was thinking about this this morning, just over a month ago, it was on, well, March 1997, it was a very important day in the history of Iraq, that's when Madeleine Albright announced that sanctions, economic sanctions would remain, whether or not Saddam complied, you know, with the weapons inspectors, and you know, whether or not Iraq was found to have, you know, any more weapons of mass destruction, it didn't matter, we were going to keep sanctions on regardless.
And I happen to know, I found out recently the reason why she said that, which was that Rolfik Heus, who was then the chief UN weapons inspector, was about to say that Iraq was now free of WMD, okay?
And this is an anti-war radio exclusive, I might tell you, but to say that Rolfik Heus was about to certify that Iraq was now free of WMD, the Clinton administration was panicked, because if he said that, then economic sanctions would have to be lifted.
Then the right wing here would say, ah, Bill Clinton let Saddam get back on his feet.
And you know, the Israeli lobby will be up in arms and you know, so the solution was to first Madeleine Albright to make this, you know, declare this policy.
In which case, what happened?
They knew what would happen, which was Saddam would say, well, heck, you know, I'm not going to cooperate with the UN anymore.
You know, if it doesn't matter whether I comply or not, why should I let your inspectors run around the country?
Because they still had some things left to do, who, you know, as he well knew, and a lot of people, other people knew, were, you know, were heavily infiltrated by the CIA and you know, MI6, that all these, you know, Western spies run around if there's nothing in it for me, and therefore I'm stopping cooperating.
And that's why he stopped cooperating.
That was a predictable and, you know, looked for result, he stopped cooperating with the UN inspectors.
So they, they pulled out and then they said, and then, you know, they said, oh, we don't know if there's any, you know, we, Saddam has kicked out the UN, we don't know what he's up to.
And that really set the stage for, you know, for 2003.
Right.
Well, and even for Operation Desert Fox in 1998.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was all, you know, they did, you know, the last thing they wanted was, you know, a certification, you know, was, was it was clear evidence that Saddam didn't have any weapons.
Right.
And, you know, in your book, you talk about also how Saddam Hussein's son-in-law had told them in 1995 that every last bit of it had been destroyed by 1991 and gave them the documents to prove it.
And that then Dick Cheney and the rest of the war party, and I believe Rumsfeld as well, cited him and half of his statement in order to justify the war.
Exactly.
It's very important that they, you know, I think, you know, I could never, that's what Hussein Kamal, who was Saddam's son-in-law who gave them that vital piece of intelligence.
I still love trying to find out if, you know, if that was circulated at all.
And people, you know, people in the White House said, yes, they were aware of it, but said, oh, we didn't believe him.
We couldn't be sure.
Well, they, you know, they didn't want to believe it.
But I found, you know, a lot of other people in the government who I said, did you know that Saddam's son-in-law, the man in charge of the weapons program had told them in 95 that, you know, everything got thrown away in 90 years before.
They say, no, no one ever told us that, you know, that was kept a secret.
I mean, it's just, well, I mean, you can't just say one thing is criminal because the whole enterprise is so criminal, but that's just one more example of it.
But yeah, no, everyone's forgotten that story.
You know, it's one of those many, many frequent stories that people have chosen to forget about, you know, what's happened to Iraq.
Yeah, when I first talked with Scott Ritter about that, he was just outraged because he pointed out that Dick Cheney's speech where he cited Hussein Kamal and basically what he said was, Saddam's son-in-law admitted that they kept some weapons after the Gulf War, but then left out, but then they destroyed it a couple months later.
Yeah.
And he made that speech to the veterans of foreign wars, to the guys who fought in the last few wars and who were going to be the ones sending their sons to fight in this one.
He lied right to their faces.
I know.
I know.
I mean, well.
And I don't know.
I forget if you wrote about this in your book or if you, maybe you can tell me Rumsfeld's role in this, but NBC News reported that the Pentagon wanted to go to Kurdistan to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his N.R. al-Islam group before the war, because of course Americans were welcome in Kurdistan, and that they were denied permission repeatedly because they needed this excuse that he was somehow the terrorist bridge between bin Laden and Saddam.
That's right.
That's right.
They needed Zarqawi.
Yeah.
Do you know what Rumsfeld's role in that was?
Well, I know that, I know, I guess he was, I know, I know Wolfowitz was very concerned about that.
About leaving him alive?
Yeah.
Because they needed, you know, the Zarqawi excuse.
In fact, you know, when asked, I know that Wolfowitz was asked, you know, after he left office saying, well, what do you think?
Do you think it was all worthwhile, you know, invading Iraq?
And he said, well, Zarqawi was already starting to operate in Europe.
Yes, there's no place for that excuse.
And also, you write in your book about how Donald Rumsfeld was furious when, in the fall of 2003, the insurgency kept getting bigger and bigger.
And I believe this is the part where you say he slammed his hand on the desk so hard that people thought he was going to break it in half.
That's right.
And he said, that's it, you know, gloves off, no more laws, torture these people and find out who's behind this insurgency.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's right.
I mean, what he really wanted to fight, it didn't sound like he was really, you know, issuing orders for, you know, ordering up empirical intelligence, you know, so he could really find out what was really going on.
I don't know.
I think it's slightly, I mean, I reasonably believe it's slightly different than that.
He was insisting that the insurgency was, you know, what were they called?
Former Saddam loyalists, FSLs, or dead-enders.
And when people said, well, maybe, you know, maybe there's another reason, maybe it's because, you know, they don't like being occupied or it's because, you know, the US occupation forces have behaved so badly, you know, he would, that's what made him so angry.
He wanted people tortured at Abu Ghraib, basically, so to confirm, so that they would then give information that would confirm what he believed and what he was telling Bush.
So it's even worse than just demanding good intelligence, you know, a lot more intelligence.
Right.
It's demanding lies to back up his beliefs.
Yeah.
That's good.
And of course, we all know, just for the record here, let me mention that the army admitted to the Red Cross that 90% of the people in that prison were completely innocent, just rounded up off the street and tortured.
Yeah.
And now, so this whole transformation, this doctrine that the Pentagon obviously is, you know, the biggest waste of money in the history of humanity, and something's got to be done about it.
But it seems to me, from reading your book, that all Rumsfeld did was come in and make everything worse.
We're still producing weapon systems, you know, multi-billion dollar weapon systems that were ordered up in 1987, when the Soviet Union was going to exist for another hundred years.
Oh, that's right.
Actually, some of them are rather older than that, the V-22, you know, sort of tilt-rotor airplane that the Marines are about to be given, since they've been working on that since the mid 70s, at least.
But it doesn't work any better now than it did then.
But the, yeah, that's right, I mean, Rumsfeld came in with this, you know, with this declared policy, which Bush had, you know, had announced during the campaign that they're going to transform the military and, you know, get rid of legacy code, what they called legacy systems.
And this is all the sort of bright sparks in the sort of neocon organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the projects on the New American Century, who were all, you know, a lot of them had ties, as in financial ties, to defense contractors, and they were going to do all these new, you know, new ways to spend money, they said they're going to transform the military.
But, you know, nothing happened, had done nothing happened for two reasons, or for various reasons.
First off, Rumsfeld, I argue, is fundamentally intellectually lazy, so he couldn't really be bothered to wrap his mind around what was what the real issues were.
And secondly, you know, the military, the institutions pushed back, they didn't want to be transformed.
They like things the way they are, whatever they say about it.
And they like, you know, they like, you know, they like the weapons they've ordered, the programs they have underway, they're the ones they want, whether they have any military relevance or not is beside the point.
So when Rumsfeld looked like in the early part of 2001, when he looked like he, you know, possibly might be a threat, and he was being rude to the Joint Chiefs, and you know, on a personal level, he was being very, being very domineering.
They fought back, you know, they leaked lots of stuff to the press, they alerted the Congress.
And by August, or certainly, yeah, by by early September 2001, Rumsfeld had kind of given up on that, not that he ever tried very hard in the first place.
He basically given up on the idea of transforming the military, then along comes 9-11, and he's got something else to do.
Now he can be Rummy the Warlord, and people didn't sort of notice that he gave up on, he went on talking about transformation, of course, you know, you know, sort of squinting his eyes and the way he'd like to do and to show how sort of wise and fast thing he was.
But actually, people on the inside will tell you that he actually basically didn't, really didn't come up much after that inside.
Yeah, well, one place they were successful, it seems like, is the propaganda campaign.
You write about how they had their pet generals, pet retired generals that they would bring in and then send out to propagandize all of us on the TV news.
That they were really good at.
It's really an amazing part of the story there.
Yeah, what they did was they, you know, they, they, you know, they realized that, you know, the more and more would be more and more news, TV, you know, demand for TV news, and commentary on these cable news shows, particularly Fox and CNN and MSNBC and so forth.
You know, there was a lot of retired military were going on and yakking away about, about military affairs.
So they co-opt, not that they needed much co-opting, but they'd bring them in, you know, like two or three times a week for a briefing at the Pentagon and they'd give them a little bit of information, a little bit of some information that hadn't been, you know, put on the wires yet, hadn't been given to the Pentagon press corps.
So then these characters could then go back to the TV studio and, you know, sound all like inside, you know, cause they knew they had stuff that the rest of us didn't know.
None of it sort of mattered that much, but it was, you know, just to give them a patina sort of inside knowledge.
And then they were all, they were allowed, this is what was one of the things that was very clever about it.
You were allowed to be a little bit of a dissident.
You could say, well, I'm not sure, you know, the, you know, Brumsfield doing quite the right thing here.
You know, I would, you know, advance our forces this way, maybe rather than that way.
Although of course the whole idea of an invasion is great.
You know, they, you couldn't be too much of a dissident because if you did, if you really criticize the policy, then you were cut out.
No more briefings for you.
Right.
Which happened to Barry McCaffrey, right?
That happened to Barry McCaffrey, yeah.
Much to his unhappiness, I might say.
But otherwise, you know, you could express a little doubt, but as long as you stay generally on board, so that, that made them that much more effective because they had the appearance of being independent.
Well, and there's, there's some kind of middle of military term for this, right?
Total information dominance or something.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, Victoria Clark, who was Brumsfield's first assistant secretary in charge of public affairs, who's very, who's a very smart propagandist really is what she is.
And she, she's very effective.
She, and she believes, I mean, this wasn't, not an idea, totally original to her, but she certainly implemented it, articulated it, and implemented it very effectively.
The idea is to fill the vacuum.
And if you, if you produce enough information, and it should as possible be true, you know, it doesn't have to be, you just, you know, you don't want to tell huge lies all the time because, you know, sooner or later you get cut, caught out.
You just want to sort of tell, give the news you want to give, and pretty, you're going to keep people at the receiving end so busy that they're not going to go anywhere else.
You know, if you, if you're, you know, a Pentagon correspondent and Victoria Clark at the Pentagon is giving you wonderful briefings all the time, telling you exactly what's going on, giving you helicopter rides, putting you up there with frontline troops, giving you access to the commanders, you're going to be so busy and let alone happy, that you're not going to bother to go around and, you know, go take time off to go ring up Scott Horton or Andrew Coburn to see if there's a contrary view.
So that was the theory they worked on and, you know, it really worked.
I mean, the ultimate, you know, thing that really worked was embedding Clark, you know, her idea was if you put correspondence with the, directly in contact with the troops as they were living and, you know, alongside the troops during the war, that the troops, you know, the, you know, individual US, the soldiers who appeared on, particularly on television will be so appealing.
It didn't really matter what the correspondent said or, you know, thought, because, you know, the troops would sell the war or they did because, you know, you know, we, you know, to see American boys in harm's way was all very exciting and the whole embedding thing worked really well.
Right.
I remember people saying that, well, they can't, the government can't possibly lie because the press is embedded right there with them and it's just to prove how honest everything is as opposed to, well, this just is going to make them that much easier to control.
That's right.
That's right.
You know, it's, it was, it was very cleverly done.
That was the most successful and unfortunately the most successful part of, and you know, there was a very political operation.
They would send Rumsfeld, you know, would go out, you know, secretary of defense.
He would go, if there was an area of the country where they wanted to shore up support, you know, he would go there and he'd do, he was like a, you know, it was like a political campaign.
He'd, you know, he'd go on local radio, local TV, he'd address civic groups, student groups, you know, he'd spend, and the whole idea was all a very sort of, you know, as I say, it was like a political campaign.
Yeah.
Well, like Andrew Card of the Hired Help said that this was like selling a new, a new fashion or something.
You don't want to debut new products in August, you want to wait till later in the fall.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, that's, you know, that's where this whole administration thinks, but Rumsfeld was very much part of that.
I mean, he pretty much wanted to sell himself because Rummy, you know, it's part of a theme in the book that, you know, Rummy, he was a failed politician.
You know, he, he, you know, he had one, precisely one contested election in his life, which was the Republican primary for the Illinois 13th congressional district in 1952.
And that was it.
I mean, he never had another contested race.
Oh, well, he kind of, but yeah, but he still thought he was, you know, he loved being a politician even though he's really actually hopeless at it.
Well, and you quote him on, on the day that he was made secretary of defense or on the day of Bush's inauguration or something saying, can you believe it?
I'm back in.
All right.
I've got another chance.
He said, I've got another chance.
Can you believe it?
Can you believe it?
I've got another chance.
Yeah.
I'm only fourth in line from the presidency or fifth.
Well, he didn't say that, but, uh, probably going through his mind.
Um, yeah, no, he was, you know, he'd been a failure.
I mean, Rummy had been nothing, you know, a terrible thing.
We were almost rid of him.
Well, that's all he is now too, his legacy now is two lost wars and malnutrition replacing obesity as the, uh, biggest health problem among children in Iraq.
That's his legacy.
That's true.
Um, I just remember you, but one thing you always have to remember, there was a guy called, uh, I don't remember his name, he was a guy who was made prime minister of France in about 1760.
And everyone said, well, he won't last long cause he's 89.
And he lasted, I think, six years, so, um, um, you know, never, never count them out until they're really out.
I mean, I don't, I have, I mean, that's wrong, so I won't come back to haunt us, but you never know.
Well, last I heard, he still has an office at the Pentagon.
He's not even all the way gone yet.
Is he?
Um, yeah, it's a DOD office.
I think it's actually in Roslin, but, uh, you know, it's DOD personnel going through his papers.
Um, well, you know, but he still, I mean, I just wonder what conversations go on over the garden fence between him and Cheney, you know, out on, out on the Maryland Eastern shore.
Uh, that's a nightmare's thought, isn't it?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, um, I have to thank you very much for your time today.
Andrew Coburn is the author of Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy.
Thanks.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you very much.
