November 14, 2002: Rumsfeld: War with Iraq Will Be Short and Relatively Painless

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says that if there is to be a war with Iraq, it will be short and relatively painless: “The idea that it’s going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind, I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990 (see August 7, 1990). Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that. It won’t be a World War III.”
Invasion about Iraqi WMDs, Not Oil - Rumsfeld refuses to say directly what the US will do if Iraq uses chemical or biological weapons on US invasion forces: “The United States government, the president and others, are communicating with people in Iraq, in the military, very forcefully that they ought not to use those weapons. Anyone in any way connected with weapons of mass destruction and their use will be held accountable, and people who helped avoid that would be advantaged.” If UN weapons inspectors find no weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld says that would prove only that “the inspections process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis.” The upcoming invasion is entirely about WMD, he insists: “It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil. It has nothing to do with the religion.” [US Department of Defense, 11/14/2002; CBS News, 11/15/2002; Unger, 2007, pp. 267-268]
Iraq and 9/11 - Rumsfeld then directly conflates the upcoming invasion with September 11. Interviewer Steve Kroft asks how he would explain the invasion to a family whose son or daughter is in the military and about to be placed in harm’s way. Rumsfeld replies: “What would I say to you? Well, I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11th and ask yourself this question, was the attack that took place on September 11th an imminent threat the month before, or two months before, or three months before, or six months before? When did the attack on September 11th become an imminent threat? When was it sufficiently dangerous to our country that had we known about it that we could have stepped up and stopped it and saved 3,000 lives? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years, or a week, or a month, and if Saddam Hussein were to take his weapons of mass destruction and transfer them, either use them himself, or transfer them to the al-Qaeda, and somehow the al-Qaeda were to engage in an attack on the United States, or an attack on US forces overseas, with a weapon of mass destruction you’re not talking about 300, or 3,000 people potentially being killed, but 30,000, or 100,000 of human beings. So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something, is a tough question. But if you think about it, it’s the nexus, the connection, the relationship between terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction with terrorist networks that has changed our lives, and changed the security environment in the world.… Our task, your task as a mother, and as a citizen, as a voter, and my task, is to try to connect the dots before something happens, not afterwards. People say, well where’s the smoking gun? Well, we don’t want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.” [US Department of Defense, 11/14/2002]