“Contrary to the image he cultivated as a tough micromanager, he had perhaps to his peril learned from LBJ’s experience in Vietnam, to trust and often defer to the generals on the ground in overseeing a war. Those generals, or many of them, told him to stay the course even when a course correction seemed obvious. I heard this myself. Rumsfeld had a habit of forming strong opinions of people. When he liked you, he let you get away with almost anything, and he liked some of the generals running the war in Iraq a lot. They were masters at toppling the regimes in Kabul and Baghdad, which they did brilliantly and quickly, but none of them were—nor was Rumsfeld —cut out for a long drawn out occupation of a foreign land. Neither, it turns out, were the members of the State Department and National Security Council who played major roles in that occupation or were supposed to. But somehow their leaders largely escaped the condemnation...”
He was a complicated man who made mistakes. But love him or hate him, he was a patriot.
There’s an old story about a king being told that an underling was patriot and asking, “Yes, but is he a patriot for me?” People who are used to having power sometimes confuse patriotism with their own agendas.
Yes a man in full. Who truly loved his country.
You can lay the failure to properly occupy Iraq at the feet of that moron George W Bush. W was told by his top general that he did not have enough troops to occupy Iraq. He could topple Saddam but he could not occupy it. So W fired that general and invaded anyway. W was an arrogant fool that put family business ahead of the nations well being. I hate the SOB, one of the worst presidents of all time.