Former Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld slammed President Barack Obama on Monday, saying
"a trained ape" would have better foreign policy skills.
During an
appearance on Fox News' "On the Record with Greta van Susteren,"
Rumsfeld criticized the White House for not securing a status of forces agreement with
Afghanistan.
“We have status of
forces agreements probably with 100, 125 countries in the world," Rumsfeld
said. "This administration, the White House, and the State Department,
have failed to get a status of forces agreement. A trained ape could get a
status of forces agreement. It doesn’t take a genius.”
Rumsfeld bashes
Obama on Afghanistan, says ‘a trained ape’ could do better
25/03/2014｜AARON BLAKE | The The Washington Post
Former defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday attacked the Obama administration for
failing to secure a status of forces agreement with Afghanistan President Hamid
Karzai.
Rumsfeld, speaking
on Fox News, said even a "trained ape" could do better.
"A trained
ape could get a status of forces agreement," Rumsfeld said. "It does
not take a genius. And we have so mismanaged that relationship."
Rumsfeld noted
that the United States has such agreements with more than 100 other countries.
Such an agreement would allow the United States to station military forces in
Afghanistan for years to come.
Karzai recently
voiced support for Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine -- a
significant blow to U.S.-Afghan relations. Rumsfeld said he understands Karzai's
increasingly antagonistic relationship, given the Obama administration's
treatment of him.
"United
States diplomacy has been so bad -- so embarrassingly bad -- that I’m not the
least bit surprised that he felt cornered and is feeling he has to defend
himself in some way or he’s not president of that country,” Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said the
Bush administration had a "first-rate" relationship with Karzai and
that it has gone "downhill like a toboggan" since Obama took over.
RUMSFELD THINKS “A TRAINED APE”
COULD DO WHAT OBAMA CAN’T
25/03/2014｜AMY DAVIDSON| The new yorker
Donald Rumsfeld,
whose mastery of foreign policy was amply displayed in Iraq, thinks that “a
trained ape” could have done a better job handling Afghanistan’s President, Hamid
Karzai, than President Obama and his team have. The problem, Rumsfeld told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox, on Monday night, is that
Obama has not been deferential enough to Karzai: “The President has been
unpleasant to him.” His entire Administration has dealt with Karzai “repeatedly
and publicly in an abusive, unpleasant manner.” Is that perhaps what Rumsfeld
considers untrained?
What is it about
Obama that bothers people like Rumsfeld? He might ask himself, for a moment,
why the idea of Obama—the President of the United States—speaking out of turn
bothers him so much, and why the word “ape” sprung to mind. Rumsfeld worked for
George W. Bush, who made something of a fetish out of talking like a cowboy; he
spent a lot of time in office trying to out-preen Dick Cheney; and yet he just
doesn’t like Obama’s tone. What’s particularly odd is that Van Susteren was
asking Rumsfeld about, of all things, Karzai’s statement of support for
Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Rumsfeld called it “understandable.”) Haven’t
we been hearing from Republicans that Obama is too passive when it comes to
Ukraine—that he’s too pleasant with Putin, and doesn’t talk tough in the way
that they imagine they would? Just a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld told Van Susteren
that “it is U.S. weakness that has shaken the world.” He has also railed
against the President’s supposed “apologies” for America.
Van Susteren asked
Rumsfeld why it was so hard to get Karzai to sign a status-of-forces
agreement—a memorandum that would clarify the legal position of American troops
in Afghanistan. Karzai has withheld his agreement for months, despite warnings
that it won’t be possible to keep even a residual American force in Afghanistan
without one, and despite the approval of Afghanistan’s loya jirga. (He may want
to insure he has a card to play after the upcoming Presidential elections.)
Rumsfeld scoffed at the idea that Karzai had been difficult—this is where he
talked about how “a trained ape can get a status-of-forces agreement. It does
not take a genius.”
By that, perhaps,
Rumsfeld meant that it does not take a genius to put American troops in another
country. Indeed, it does not—Rumsfeld proved that himself, by getting our
forces over to Iraq. The hard part can be getting them out.
“I realize these
are tough jobs, being President or Secretary of State. But, by golly, they have
trashed Karzai publicly over and over and over,” Rumsfeld said. This when
Karzai had been so “friendly” during the Bush Administration; under Obama, it
had all “gone downhill like a toboggan.” And so, as far as Rumsfeld is
concerned, Karzai, a man whose country was invaded by the Soviet Union, was
left “feeling he has to defend himself” against a United States government now
in the process of withdrawing from his territory by supporting Russia’s
invasion of a third country. And, Rumsfeld said, “I personally sympathize with
him.” The Obama Administration has certainly made mistakes in Afghanistan, but
the most questionable moves, like doubling down on troop levels early on, have
tended to be hawkish—and, Rumsfeld style, they didn’t really work. A bitterness
toward Obama that would be rich enough to evoke Rumsfeldian warmth toward
aspiring Russian proxies is quite a thing. (It seems likely that Karzai is
hoping that Putin can be a source of replacement cash, a process that has already begun.)
Rumsfeld may be
right that it’s easier than it looks to make Karzai happy, as long as one
doesn’t mind losing a good deal of taxpayer money to Afghan graft, and American
lives in opaque standoffs in villages where we have no idea who is paying whom
for a drug route or a piece of a construction project two provinces over. When
Van Susteren suggested that Karzai’s support for Putin on Crimea was “a poke in
the eye” to the Americans who had fought and died in Afghanistan to keep his
government safe, Rumsfeld brushed her off. Karzai, he said, might have conveyed
“his extreme anger” to the American government, but “he also said to the
American people give them my best wishes and my gratitude.” How very pleasant
of him.
