WASHINGTON DC – Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are being respectively called “iron-ass” and “arrogant fellow“ in a new biography of former US president George Bush, who says they did not serve his son well as president when he decided to invade Iraq in 2003.
Bush senior spoke about the closest advisers during the presidency of his son, George W. Bush, in a book coming out later this month titled “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” written by Jon Meacham.
“I think he served the president badly,” Bush told Meacham about former defence secretary Rumsfeld, according to a report in the New York Times.
“I’ve never been that close to him anyway. … There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that,” he was quoted as saying in the book.
Regarding Cheney, who also served under Bush senior for four years as defence secretary, his former boss said: “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.”
He speculates in his biography that Cheney´s view became more radicalized after 9/11. He said he became “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling-under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.”
The New York Times also quoted Bush telling Meacham that “The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department.” But he blamed his own son, who was the president at the time, for the situation.
Cheney and Rumsfeld both were in the vanguard of efforts that resulted in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that characterized the presidency of the Bush junior.
The biography comes out as another Bush scion – Jeb Bush – is running as a Republican candidate in the 2016 US presidential election.
Recently, former British prime minister Tony Blair, another leading figure who beat the war drums, apologized for “mistakes” made in the invasion of Iraq.
"I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought," Blair said in an exclusive interview on CNN.
Blair was referring to the claim that Saddam's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was used by the US and British governments to justify launching the invasion. But the intelligence reports the claim was based on turned out to be false.
.webp&w=3840&q=75)