Rumsfeld: ‘I Have Not Even Attempted’ To Follow What’s Going On In Iraq, Too Busy ‘Ar

[Janett_Reno]

Rumsfeld: ‘I Have Not Even Attempted’ To Follow What’s Going On In Iraq, Too Busy ‘Arranging My Papers’

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/15/...fox-interview/

In an interview with Fox News last night, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — one of the key architects of the Iraq disaster — was asked whether he currently “pays attention to specifics about what’s going on day to day in Iraq.”

Rumsfeld responded by claiming it’s impossible to follow events when you’re “on the outside.” He then added that he doesn’t have time to follow what’s going on in Iraq because he’s too busy with administrative tasks:

I’ve been very busy doing a series of things: setting up an office and hiring staff, arranging my papers to give to the Library of Congress, setting up a new foundation…

Rusmfeld re-emphasized the point, concluding his answer by stating: “So I’ve been busy doing those kinds of things and I have not even attempted stay as current as one would if you were in the government, constantly seeing all the intelligence and information.”

The Hoover Institution recently announced that Rumsfeld would join the think tank as an “ideology and terror expert.” Rumsfeld has previously announced he is working on setting up a new foundation for the next generation of Donald Rumsfelds to study and grow. He is also in the process of authoring a book and was reportedly shopping it around in the hopes of receiving a “large cash advance.”

Book publishers had expressed “tepid interest” in a Rumsfeld memoir that talked about his six years under Bush. The New York Post reported Rumsfeld was re-tooling the book, and “he now plans to make it a full-blown autobiography rather than simply a treatment of his six years in the cabinet.” Asked if he was writing a book, Rumsfeld told Fox News:

I might. I’m thinking about it. A lot of people are urging me to do it. I’ve not made a decision. If I did, it would not be a quick-and-dirty thing, and the money from it, I would put into the foundation that I’ve just established — in the process of establishing.

It would probably be a memoir that would run the full span, back through the Depression and World War II and my life as opposed to the last 15 minutes.

Rumsfeld has too many things on his plate to worry about the catastrophe he helped create in Iraq.