Stephen Colbert almost gets Donald Rumsfeld to admit Iraq War was a mistake

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was on The Late Show Monday night, and Stephen Colbert was very careful with his questions. Rumsfeld was on to promote his new solitaire app, but all anyone ever wants to talk to Rumsfeld about is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Colbert was no exception. He started out by asking if the current situation in Iraq and Syria, including the rise of the Islamic State, was "a worst-case scenario, or a beyond-worse-case scenario" when the George W. Bush administration was planning the Iraq War. "I think the disorder in the entire region, and the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shia, is something that, generally, people had not anticipated," Rumsfeld said.

Then Colbert got a little more direct. "The top two Republicans and the top two Democrats, none of them thinks going into Iraq was the right choice to make," he said. "Do you still think it was the right thing to do, 12 years later?" Rumsfeld said that when Bush made the decision, Iraq had disregarded several U.N. resolutions, had used chemical weapons on his citizens and Iran, and "it seems to me the president, given the facts he had from the intelligence community, made the right decision. In retrospect, they didn't find large caches of chemical or biological weapons."

Colbert turned to Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" formulation and introduced a fourth option, "unknown knowns," gently suggesting that the Bush administration misled the American people by asserting that Iraq was a threat to the U.S. when the intelligence was too murky to back that up. "The president had available to him intelligence from all elements of the government," Rumsfeld said. "And the National Security Council members had that information; it was all shared, it was all supplied. And it's never certain. If it were a fact, it wouldn't be called intelligence." Colbert looked taken aback. "Wow. I think you answered my question." You can watch the strange, nearly 10-minute conversation below. Peter Weber

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