MEMOIR: Known and Unknown: A MemoirBy Donald Rumsfeld, Sentinel, 815 pp. £25
DONALD RUMSFELD was secretary of defence in the George W Bush administration and chief architect of the 2003 invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq. The title of his memoir is taken from his famous comment to journalists in February 2002 about whether Iraq supplied weapons to terrorist groups. “[T]here 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.”
It was typical Rumsfeld, clever, evasive, exasperating and cadenced – it reads almost like blank verse. This hefty memoir shows an undiminished proficiency in these skills.
A case in point is his defence of one of the most egregious excuses made by the US administration for going to war, that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Rumsfeld cites intelligence about the presence of a facility for chemical weapons in Khurmal, in northeast Iraq. Before the war this Kurdish town was controlled by an extreme group known as Ansar al-Islami with links to al-Qaeda. This was a known known.
Rumsfeld omits to mention however that a US Senate report on pre-war intelligence in Iraq concluded that Ansar al-Islami was considered by Hussein as an enemy and a threat to his regime, or that the US Defence Intelligence Agency determined that it was not a branch of al-Qaeda.
The contentious claim was also made by Colin Powell in his notorious presentation of the case for war to the UN Security Council on February 5th, 2003. But after his resignation as secretary of state, Powell confessed he felt terrible about assertions that turned out to be false and that not only had he never seen evidence to suggest a connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda, he was devastated by the failure of “people in the intelligence community” who didn’t enlighten him.
Rumsfeld writes witheringly that Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie. “The President did not lie. The Vice President [Dick Cheney] did not lie. Tenet [head of the CIA] did not lie. Rice [national security adviser] did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.”
They may or may not have been lying but those of us reporting on the events leading up to war could feel the scratches of wool being pulled over our eyes.
At the very least, US officials collectively willed themselves to believe there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Rumsfeld cites a multitude of “specific, seemingly credible reports” (including a private warning by Egypt’s then president, Hosni Mubarak, that Hussein had biological weapons). What they ignored was the obvious: that Hussein let people think he might have WMD to frighten his neighbours, and that bitter enemies of the Iraq regime would feed the US administration a farrago of lies.
Rumsfeld is scathing about those sections of the American media which pilloried his conduct of the war and consistently lambasted him for remarks described as cold-hearted but which he considered straightforward, such as his often quoted reply to a soldier in Afghanistan complaining to him about lack of body armour, “You go to war with the army you have.” He was right, you do, but empathy was not Rumsfeld’s strongpoint.
While exasperated with selective leaks from the state department that discredited him, there is not a word here about New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was given a diet of false information by Rumsfeld’s department of defence and its sinister Iraqi manipulator, Ahmed Chalabi. Miller’s frontpage stories about the certainty of WMD in Iraq and about Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda were cited by Rumsfeld on television as a motive for going to war.
Nor does Rumsfeld dwell on the uncomfortable fact that his war actually allowed al-Qaeda to gain a deadly and lasting hold in Iraq.
Of regrets, however, he has a few. He offered to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal and thinks he should have. He wishes he hadn’t said about WMD sites: “We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
He also would like to take back some of his more callous comments such as “stuff happens” when dismissing concerns about the failure of US troops to prevent the looting of Baghdad museum – which he correctly points out were considerably exaggerated at the time.
He is not apologetic however about the fundamental decision to go to war with Iraq. Failure to do so, he argues, would have sent a message of American unwillingness to confront nations supporting terrorism. Also getting rid of Hussein “created a more stable and secure world”.
Rumsfeld devotes considerable space to justifying the controversial interrogation techniques he authorised and rubs in the fact that Barrack Obama is continuing some of his most-criticised initiatives, such as keeping Guantanamo prison camp open.
This is a classic political heritage writing and score-settling: the author is almost always right and his adversaries, Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice especially, are either wrongheaded or incompetent.
Known and Unknown,while clever and readable, is a self-serving memoir to be placed alongside that of an earlier defence secretary, Robert McNamara, the architect of that other botched American war, in Vietnam, who at least acknowledged in his autobiography, In Retrospect, that he was wrong on the basics.
Conor O'Clery is a former North America Editor of The Irish Times.His book Moscow, 25 December, 1991: The Last Day Of The Soviet Unionwill be published later this year
