Former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld is starting to allow for the idea that maybe, just maybe, he and the Bush administration should have sent more troops to Iraq — though he’s not ready to say that it’s true.
Rumsfeld sat down for an interview Diane Sawyer of ABC News. He said of the troop level question that he was not ready to agree with the criticism, but that it was “possible.” He also added: “You know, the path you didn’t take is always smoother.”
Pressed on the fact that President Bush has written that cutting troop levels in Iraq was “the most important failure in the execution of the war,” Rumsfeld called that “interesting.”
“I don’t have enough confidence to say that that’s right. I think that it’s possible. We had [an] enormous number of troops ready to go in. They had — we had off-ramps, if they weren’t needed.”
“It’s hard to know,” Rumsfeld continued. “You know, the path you didn’t take is always smoother.”
Rumsfeld was also asked about whether he would have gone to war if he had known about the lack of actual weapons of mass destruction. He said that he did not know — and offered these words of wisdom: “What you know today can help you on things you’re thinking about tomorrow. It can’t help you with things you were thinking about back then.”
Some clips of the interview below:
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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