Donald Rumsfeld Says "a Trained Ape" Could Do Better Than Obama on Afghanistan

By Elias Isquith, Salon

25 March 14

The former defense secretary tells Fox News that the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship has been "mismanaged"

onald Rumsfeld, the man who as defense secretary helped orchestrate and oversee not one but two disastrous wars, appeared on Fox News on Monday in order to bash President Obama by negatively comparing him to “a trained ape.”

“A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement [with Afghanistan],” Rumsfeld said. “It does not take a genius. And we have so mismanaged that relationship.”

Rumsfeld went on to offer sympathy for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who recently angered the White House by voicing his support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, saying that the wildly corrupt leader of the delicate and unstable Afghanistan government has good reason to be angry with his American backers.

“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 explained.

He then went on to brag that, during the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. and Karzai had a “first-rate” relationship. It’s only under Obama, Rumsfeld said, that relations between the two nations have gone “downhill like a toboggan.”

Rumsfeld served as President Bush’s first defense secretary, holding the position from 2001 to 2006, when he was ignominiously canned by Bush in an attempt to communicate to the public that the Democrats’ landslide win in that year’s midterm elections hadn’t gone unheeded.