Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clarified on Wednesday that his remarks about Iraq given to a British newspaper last week were not “anti-Bush.”
“The implication that that statement was anti-Bush is ridiculous,” he told CNN on Tuesday.
The man who oversaw the invasion of Iraq in 2003 told the Times of London on Friday that “the idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic.”
“I was concerned about it when I first heard those words,” Rumsfeld said.
“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” he added.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld elaborated on his remarks in the interview with CNN:
When we went in, my view — and I thought it was a broadly held view — was that the goal was to have Saddam Hussein not be there, and to have what replaced Saddam Hussein be a government that would not have weapons of mass destruction, that would not invade its neighbors, and that would be reasonably respectful of diverse ethnic groups — meaning the Sunni, the Shia, the Kurds …
