United States Secretaries Of Defense

"Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk was on the mark... in November 2002, he wrote, “Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember that.” On many psychological levels, the Bush team was able to manipulate post-9/11 emotions well beyond the phantom of Iraqi involvement in that crime against humanity. The dramatic changes in political climate after 9/11 included a drastic upward spike in the attitude—fervently stoked by the likes of Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the president—that our military should be willing to attack potential enemies before they might attack us. Few politicians or pundits were willing to confront the reality that this was a formula for perpetual war, and for the creation of vast numbers of new foes who would see a reciprocal logic in embracing such a credo themselves. President Bush’s national security adviser “felt the administration had little choice with Hussein,” reporter Bob Woodward recounted in mid-November 2002. A quote from Condoleezza Rice summed up the approach. “Take care of threats early.” Determining exactly what constitutes a threat—and how to “take care” of it—would be up to the eye of the beholder in the Oval Office."

"Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War Against Terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life. When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So, standing here today, it's hard for me to say this, but The American Way of Life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a world beyond America."

"Here's what I can tell you about Don Rumsfeld. You're never going to get any credit. And you'll only know how well you're doing if he gives you more work. If that happens, you're doing fine."

"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."

"In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Donald Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld."

"He's a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that."

"The warfare in Syria is a follow-on to the attacks on Iraq and Libya. We may recall General Wesley Clark’s claim in March 2007 that shortly after 9/11 a Pentagon official had shown him a Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz list of seven Middle East and North African countries that were scheduled for attack and regime change. Iraq and Libya, both on that list, have been attacked and transformed into U.S.-destroyed states with new or unsettled leadership. The United States has been supporting regime change forces in Syria as far back as 2011, but the job has not been completed, in part because of Russian support for president Assad. Truce efforts by the U.S. and Russia have regularly broken down because the U.S. still aims at regime change and supports the rebel forces that Russia targets, many or most of which are Al Qaeda- or ISIS-related and whose victory would mean another Libya-like failed state."

"Cheney and Rumsfeld were inveterate schemers whose cynicism about going to war was exceeded only by their ineptitude in conducting it."

"Mohammed al-Qahtani's torture, which was directly authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, included forcing him to urinate on himself, months of isolation, sleep deprivation, and blaring loud music, even when he was in the hospital. "They strip-search him and briefly make him stand nude," the interrogation log recounts matter-of-factly. "They tell him to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists."

"About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments... I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”... he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.”"

"At the same time, Kissinger, Carter and détente were condemned as weakening the West by a group of conservative Democrats led by Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a critic of SALT, as well as by key Republicans who were influential in the Ford administration (1974–7), notably his Chief of Staff, Richard (Dick) Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on advice from commentators such as Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz who warned about Soviet intentions. The continuity of this group, through 1990s’ opposition to Clintonian liberal internationalism, to the neo-conservative activism of the early 2000s, especially against Iraq, is notable."

"And the only way there's going to be followers, is if the leader is doing things that have merit, that are persuasive to others. Why else would someone follow somebody if they didn't think the individual was doing something worthwhile, going in the right direction?"

"The natural state of man is to want to be free. To have opportunities. To have choices."

"After he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, he (Gaddafi) did not want to be Saddam Hussein. He gave up his nuclear program."

"It's about professionalism, and it's also about our respect for ourselves, about how we feel about seeing GAO reports describing waste and mismanagement and money down a rat hole. We need your help. I ask for your help. I thank all of you who are already helping. I have confidence that we can do it. It's going to be hard. There will be rough times. But it's also the best part of life to be engaged in doing something worthwhile."

"But keep in mind the story about the donkey, the burro, and the ass. The man and the boy were walking down the street with the donkey and people looked and laughed at them and said, "Isn't that foolish—they have a donkey and no one rides it." So the man said to the boy, "Get on the donkey; we don't want those people to think we're foolish." So they went down the road and people looked at the boy on the donkey and the man walking alongside -- "Isn't that terrible, that young boy is riding the donkey and the man's walking." So they changed places, went down the road, people looked and said, "Isn't that terrible, that strong man is up there on the donkey and making the little boy walk." So they both got up on the donkey, the donkey became exhausted, came to a bridge, fell in the river and drowned. And of course the moral of the story is, if you try to please everybody, you're going to lose your donkey."

"A new idea ignored may be the next threat overlooked. A person employed in a redundant task is one who could be countering terrorism or nuclear proliferation."

"Some might ask, how in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people? To them I reply, Today, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

"The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible. To that end, we're announcing today a series of steps the Department of Defense will take to shift our focus and our resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to tooth."

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. The adversary is closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them."

"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."

"Stuff happens."

"And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into the bombing campaign."

"Pieces of intelligence, scraps of intelligence...you run down leads and you run down leads, and you hope that sometimes it works."

"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."

"There will be good moments, and there will be less good moments."

"Let's hear it for the essential daily briefing, however hollow and empty it might be. We'll do it."

"Oh, Lord. I didn't mean to say anything quotable."

"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."

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

"It recalls to mind the statement by Winston Churchill, something to the effect that: I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof."

"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."

"What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we're seeing is slices of the war in Iraq."

"We do have a saying in America: if you're in a hole, stop digging ..... erm, I'm not sure I should have said that."

"I shouldn't get into ... this is diplomacy, and I don't do diplomacy."

"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. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously — but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment."

"...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 long for that to happen dealing with people like this."

"I didn't advocate invasion...I wasn't asked."

"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."

"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."

"I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

"[ Osama bin Laden is] either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive."

"Look at me! I'm sweet and lovable!"

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty."

"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."

"Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."

"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."

"Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently -- what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? -- you're right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem. But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."

"Then there are three or four countries that have said they won't do anything. I believe Libya, Cuba and Germany are ones that have indicated they won't help in any respect."