Rummys not going to be easy to dismiss. Hes a guy with sharp elbows who grew up in the tough democracy of Chicago politics in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. A bright, athletic, (and at the time) moderate-conservative, he won a long-shot run for Congress in 196, a few months after his 30th birthday. He soon found himself maneuvering into the inner-sanctum of GOP politics during the tumultuous 1960s.
Within the Nixon and then Ford White Houses, Rummy elbowed and jockeyed for power, even with the likes of that then youthful and ambitious politician Richard Cheney. Henry Kissinger called Rumsfeld the "most ruthless man he ever met" (and Kissinger was a guy who met Mao Tse-tung and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention himself).
His rocket-like run-up in power began when President Gerald Ford appointed Rumsfeld to be his Chief of Staff. (September 1974). A year later he became the youngest SECDEF. In December 1983, as Reagan's envoy, Rumsfeld met with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and reopened relations between the United States and Iraq that hadn't existed since 1967. In 1984 he met with Tariq Aziz, telling the Iraqi foreign minister that the United States squarely supports Saddam's regime. He also characterized America's recent condemnation of their using chemical weapons was made "strictly" in principle. Subsequently, he became involved in efforts to open oil pipelines across Iraq.
In the 1970s, as CEO at GD Searle he ruthlessly relocated the entire headquarters of the embattled pharmaceutical company in a show of power with the board that had just hired him. During the days when the GOP was out of power, he aspired to out-fox his Ford administration pal, Cheney, and to maneuver his way back into the White House, but never got back onto that track. He still used dirty ball to advance his cause. In 1996, Tom Brokaw, taped from a satellite transmission that he did not know was being broadcast the following quote: "Rummy used to get even with guys in the White House by leaking stuff to Rather that didn't have any basis in fact."
Along with many other former Reagan administration defense officials, he was a charter member of a group that would eventually call itself the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). As early as 1997, many insiders from this group were involved in picking Texas's new governor, George Dubya Bush, as the GOP's next presidential candidate. As this nucleus of insiders coalesced within conservative circles, Rummy joined them in January 1998, in sending an open letter urging President Clinton to develop "a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power."
As the country's oldest SECDEF, Rummy was one of the vulcans, organizing early military actions against Saddam, and a tough military stand to develop a US dominance strategy for the 21st century. Confronted with large goals and small budgets, his revolutionary DOD "transformation" theories emphasized stealth and air power over land power and mass. As the principle architect of the Bush Administrations plan to overthrow Saddam, he publicly diminished the importance of settling scores with UBL and other and emphasized the tenuous connections between Saddam and global terrorism. The rest, as they say, is history.
There is no way Rummy will go easily.
www.rotten.com
www.republicandictionary.com
