Does anyone else (regardless of their position on the war) find Donald Rumsfeld a breath of fresh air? I enjoy watching him speak his mind without all the usual layers of spin, filtering, and reluctance to offend anyone. He’s sometimes too smug ignoring or shutting down questions he doesn’t like, but compared to the evasive, dithering weasels we have in Parliament up here, I’ll take Rumsfeld anyday.
Could a younger, needs-to-get-elected politician get away with this kind of bluntness, or would the voters and/or media destroy him or her? Why do electorates seem to prefer glib smoothies who we know are lying to us to honest men that we disagree with?
Also, consider: someone like Rumsfeld has the potential to be relatively objective and unselfish: he’s already rich, he’s had children who have grown into adulthood, he’s experienced significant professional success, and he’s already reached the pinnacle of his career, and so isn’t beholden to the pressures of getting re-elected.
He’s entertaining, I’ll give him that. I haven’t really caught him saying anything smart yet, IMHO. And I guess I’m used to more layers of spin than you are, 'cause I see plenty.
I don’t know. I’m not American, nor Canadian, and don’t pretend to know all about the respective governments. In my country, politics tend to be a bit different. Which is not to say that we don’t have our fair share of asshole politicians: we do. But the preference certainly doesn’t seem to be “glib smoothies”, as you put it. And I kind of like that.
People who are rich and in power tend to want to become even more rich, and more powerful. I’d say Rumsfeld is no exception.
I love to listen to him. I get the sense that I may or may not like what he says but that he doesn’t particularly care if I do or not. He’d be a terrible politician for exactly that reason. I am sure the real politicians pull him away from issues that they don’t want talked about quite so forthrightly.
Rummy, like Bush often is, is a liar without tact. The other people in the administration, generally, are liars WITH tact. The trick is that people assume artless people must be honest. It’s a good trick, but it’s not true. For Rumsfeld, who was such a big part in making Saddam into the monster he became, to now be leading the charge against him shows you how honest he is.
burntsand, Rumsfeld was never elected in the first place. He’s the kind of upper-level appointee who always is allowed to speak out, precisely because he’s never accountable to voters. Up here, look for that kind of talk from David Dodge at the Bank of Canada, or the Auditor General, or the head of Elections Canada. (Names are escaping me, due to a cold.)
As for being evasive-- I find he refuses to answer questions just as often as any politician, he just does it in a different manner.
And as for being rich-- well, he parlayed his earlier political career in the Nixon era into a great overseas job working for US industry, then came back with 10 million in the bank.
I know this isn’t GQ, but I haven’t previously heard this accusation levelled. Can you point me towards any evidence that the U.S. in general, or Rumsfeld in particular, was involved in selling biological weapons to Iraq, beyond the type of medical samples that are routinely sold to foreign research hospitals?
This detailed article in the LA Weekly lists a number of US companies who sold materials involved in the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons to Iraq.
Sales tended to be of chemical weapons precursors, manufacturing equipment, biological growth medium, etc, rather than the finished agents, but the potential use of this technology would have been clear, especially as Saddam began using chemical weapons in 1982.
So did Rumsfeld sell biological weapons to Iraq? No. Did US companies knowingly sell items that could be used to make WMDs, and were these sales approved by the US government? Yes.
In fairness, many British, French and German companies also sold equipment used in Iraq’s WMD programs.
I thought this was widely known. I read about here in the UK years ago. I think there was even a US Congressional report. Remember that the US was worried a decade or so ago that the Iranian theocracy with its large army would dominate the region, so they made sure Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
from another thread:
rjung, replying to december also disbelieving that the US sold Saddam the weapons:
"Records Show US Sent Biological Weapons Germs to Iraq
by Matt Kelley, Associated Press
WASHINGTON –– Iraq’s bioweapons program that President Bush wants to eradicate got its start with help from Uncle Sam two decades ago, according to government records getting new scrutiny in light of the discussion of war against Iraq.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent samples directly to several Iraqi sites that U.N. weapons inspectors determined were part of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program, CDC and congressional records from the early 1990s show. Iraq had ordered the samples, claiming it needed them for legitimate medical research.
The CDC and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including the West Nile virus.
The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran.
…
How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot, Sunday Herald (Scotland)
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs – which oversees American exports policy – reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee’s reports on ‘US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq’, undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis – the micro-organism that causes anthrax – were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers’ City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US."
Note that the shipments continued after Saddam gassed thousand of Kurds.
While it is true that Secretary of Defense is not an elected office, Rumsfeld has in fact held elective office before. Specifically he was elected to the House of Representatives, don’t know the district, in 62, 64, 66, and 68.
