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Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld was the United States Secretary of Defense, succeeded by Robert Gates. He also served as Defense Secretary 1975–1977 under President Ford, and in other roles under various presidents.

Sourced

  • Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
  • Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.






I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot -- one thing after another.

From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.

Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.

  • I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.
    • At a hearing of the Senate's appropriations subcommittee on defense, May 14, 2003

  • You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase immediate threat. I didn't, the president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's what's happened.






  • We're so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that's just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is.

  • We know where they [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat....I would also add, we saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press and they moved things out. They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don't know that. But it's way too soon to know. The exploitation is just starting.
    • Interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News This Week, March 30, 2003


  • …it seems to me that it's up to all of us to try to tell the truth, to say what we know, to say what we don't know, and recognize that we're dealing with people that are perfectly willing to, to lie to the world to attempt to further their case and to the extent people lie of, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn't take very for that to happen dealing with people like this.
    • From the 2004 documentary film Control Room

  • As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
    • Responding to the question "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"






  • Those who follow orders to commit such crimes will be found and they will be punished. War crimes will be prosecuted. And it will be no excuse to say, 'I was just following orders.' Any official involved in such crimes will forfeit hope of amnesty or leniency with respect to past action.







  • I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know, and that's a good thing.




  • I suppose the implication of that is the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs.

Unsourced

  • Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.
    • Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 23, 2004
    • Regards upcoming elections in Iraq

  • That just couldn't be any more wrong than spreading marmalade on a steaming pile of flapjacks.
    • Response to the suggestion that "your planning (or lack thereof) has created utter disaster zones in both those countries (Afghanistan and Iraq)".

  • I didn't know you were Secretary of Defense. Nice to meet you, Mr. Secretary of Defence. Maybe you can tell us: are we spreading our armed forces too thin? Because you'd know – you'd know where all of the Army's 33 brigades are stationed - and their missions, secret and otherwise. And while you were dispatching the U.S. forces and preparing strategies to defeat the enemies of freedom, you thought "Hey, I really think it would be swell if I spread our forces too thin." Right? That’s what you thought, didn't you?"
    • Response to a journalist who asked "Don’t you think we’re spreading our forces too thin?"

  • Here in the Bush Administration, we're all grown-up enough to not let little things like Ivy League rivalries get in the way of work.

  • This war has been marked by so many lies and evasions that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie.
    • "Rumsfeld versus Rumsfeld" by James Mann, LA Times, 2006-05-03 (accessed 2006-05-05)
    • supposedly correcting Henry Kissinger's erroneously early claim that all Americans had left Vietnam, c. April 1975

  • Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein is not iminent, that he is 5-7 years away from having a nuclear weapon. I would not be so certain.
    • Face the Nation

  • You may find people who will contend that patriotism is something to be a little bit embarrassed about or that honor is somewhat outdated as a notion and that concentrating on America's imperfection makes you a realist. Not so. That's the sign of a cynic. Being a cynic is easy. You can just sit back, heckle from the cheap seats, while others serve, storm beaches, build nations, meet their destinies. Idealists write history's stirring chapters; cynics read those chapters and seem not to understand. Choose to be an idealist. There have always been those who contend that what's wrong with the world is America. Don't believe it.

About Donald Rumsfeld

  • We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement -- that's the kindest word I can give you -- of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war. The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously. I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.
    • John McCain
 
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