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Saturday, December 21, 2013

Famous Last Words: I don't do quagmires

Following up on the last post about whether Kennedy would have avoided a Vietnam quagmire, just a quote from a press conference with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2003:
Rumsfeld: I have since gone to the dictionary. And I have looked up several things, one of which I can't immediately recapture, but one was "guerrilla war", another was "insurgency", another was "unconventional war" --
Q: "Quagmire"?
Rumsfeld: Pardon me?
Q: "Quagmire"? (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: No. That's someone else's business. Quagmire is -- I don't do quagmires. (Laughter.)
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer III