War should be the last resort Donald Rumsfeld by Philip Weiss on June 1, 2012 13 10sharesFacebook 2tweetsTwitter 0stumbledStumbleUpon 0sharesReddit 0recommendGoogle The former Defense Secretary was on Charlie Rose the other night. Rose asked him about the Iraq war.
Rose: You had a list of things that could go wrong
Rumsfeld: I was worried about a lot of things that could go wrong. Its in my website. Its called the Parade of Horribles now. I sat down and said, what are the kinds of things that could go wrong and listed a whole series of them. And fortunately some of them havent. Unfortunately some of them happened
Rose: Sectarian conflict was one of them.
Rumsfeld: Sure. Exactly. But war has to be the last resort and I was hopeful to the very end that the president and the United States and the coalition would be successful in getting Saddam Hussein to either acquiesce and agree with the United Nations or leave the country, or that he could be killed at Dora farms in that first attack... He wasn't there.
(One question: How seriously should anyone take a defense secretary who writes memos called the Parade of Horribles when he's contemplating bombing an Arab country, and files this and other such memos under the heading "Snowflakes"?)