Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Henry Rumsfeldis an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the second oldestperson to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Counsellor to the President, the United States Permanent...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 July 1932
CityEvanston, IL
CountryUnited States of America
We have to expect that global terrorist networks that we know are trying to get these weapons will in fact be successful at some time in the future,
People say, 'Well, where's the smoking gun?' Well, we don't want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.
managing their affairs as people responsible for weapons of that power.
We need joint integrated approaches to battlefield challenges. We need weapon systems capable of producing the precise and timely destruction of enemy targets.
Imagine, a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000. It's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
Externally, they appear to be weapons of mass destruction, ... But until we get into them, look at them, analyze it, find out what it was, we're not going to know.
It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction. And does everyone know he had them at one point? Certainly. Does everyone believe -- even those in the U.N. who voted the other way -- acknowledge the fact that he had filed a fraudulent declaration with the United Nations?
We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons—including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox.
I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.
It is hard to put a price on some things. What is the value of having prevented nuclear weapons from getting into the hands of a dictator like Saddam Hussein - or of Gadhafi ?
Absent a dictator, absent the Saddam Hussein regime, our goal would be first to have a single country, not have a country broken up into pieces, it would be to see that it would be a country without weapons of mass destruction, a country that did not try to impose its will upon its neighbors and it was a country that was respectful of the rights of minorities and the ethnic groups that exist in the country,
A very smart weapon, a good weapon might work 85 to 90 percent of the time. The rest of the time it doesn't work right. Now that's a very good percentage, ... But it means that there is one out of 10 that is not going to do what it was intended to do.
This decision is not about any one weapon system, but merely about a strategy of warfare, a strategy that drives the choices that we must make about how best to prepare our total forces for the future,
Clearly there was ground fire, there's no question about that. But I'm not in a position to say that the muzzle flash was one type of weapon as opposed to another type of weapon. And therefore I shan't do so,