Richard Nixon’s view of Donald Rumsfeld was that he was “a ruthless little bastard”. Nixon, Andrew Cockburn says, may well have considered that to be a compliment but it didn’t make him any less wary of a man he dispatched to Brussels.

Andrew Cockburn wrote a biography of Rumsfeld and the title itself tells a story. Published in the US under the title Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, the European title was punchier – Rumsfeld: An American Disaster.

Donald Rumsfeld died on Tuesday aged 88. He was a hugely influential figure in the administration of George W Bush, particularly in relation to the invasion of Iraq, something which he began plotting for almost as soon as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

“He induced chaos.”

In this podcast, Cockburn, speaking from his home in Ardmore, analyses the man he called “an inveterate schemer” – scheming which may have reached an disastrous peak in the planning and lack of it for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Cockburn disputes the idea that there was a good outcome once America decided to topple Saddam (he also acknowledges that he has Iraqi friends who think differently) but there is no doubt that the way America went about the post-war plan compounded the disasters of the war. “Rumsfeld had made zero preparation for doing so,” he says of the post-war planning.

Rumsfeld was one of those who drove the argument that Saddam Hussein needed to be toppled once the World Trade Center was attacked. Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when the plane flew in there.

 “On the day of 9/11 by 2.30 in the afternoon he was already sketching out notes about how to use this to attack Iraq.”

This scheming was part of the power play that accompanied the run-up to that war. The State Department, under Colin Powell, may have been operating a more thought-through idea for the invasion (Powell used the Pottery Barn motto – “If you break it, you own it”) while Rumsfeld simply wanted to preach the credo of freedom.

“Freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here,” he said in April 2003 as the war took hold.

Rumsfeld, Cockburn says, was a “superficial guy” who believed the administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction.

Andrew Cockburn

He also believed, from his years in business when he became obsessed with what he regarded as efficiencies, that there was a more mobile way of conducting battle. He promoted “shock and awe” but even that compounded the problems.

“It was all kind of frivolous,” Cockburn says. “He used that to interfere with the military. But actually, there was very little efficiency involved. I mean, actually, what he did was… whatever else you say about the US military, they always have a system and a plan for moving a large body of troops from A to B – from the United States in that instance, to Kuwait, to invade Iraq. They knew what to do and how you have the schedules and arrange the shipping. Rumsfeld sort of wilfully interfered in all that and gummed the whole thing up. So, you know, lots of things didn’t turn up and ammunition didn’t turn up. He induced chaos. I never saw any sign of him producing any efficiency in anything whatsoever, nor did anyone else.”

Rumsfeld had served as Defence Secretary under Gerald Ford and he was brought back in the same role 24 years later under George W Bush. The fact that during his first spell he had made an enemy of another future president and father of George W may, if anything, have counted in his favour.

“He was a courtier, really. So he was very careful to preserve that relationship.”

“When Ford became president, Rumsfeld got the job of White House Chief of Staff. But his sights were set on getting Ford to have him run as vice president in the election that was coming in 1976. But there already was a vice president, Nelson Rockefeller. So Rumsfeld schemed to get rid of him by spreading the word that Rockefeller was too liberal for the Republican ticket. The other problem he had was George Bush Senior, who was another likely person to put on the vice presidential ticket.

“So he schemed, he intrigued to get him sent to the CIA, which in those days was thought to be non-political so you couldn’t then run for office. So both of them then hated Donald Rumsfeld. Later on, as I tell in the book, Rockefeller got his revenge by preventing Rumsfeld getting on the ticket in 1980. And George Bush Senior, when he became president, made sure that Rumsfeld didn’t get a job.”

It wouldn’t have been in keeping with Rumsfeld’s personality if he didn’t then see a way of turning this to his own advantage.

“You know the relationship between the two Bushes was always interesting,” Cockburn says. “When Senior died, Junior made a big sort of show of grief and gave a great eulogy and all the rest, but it’s not clear really how far back that went. I mean, to digress from Rumsfeld for a second, George Bush Jr was a big disappointment for his father, he was the drunk living out of the garage for a while and was always failing in business. It’s pretty well known that it was Jeb Bush, the other son, that George senior always thought was the one who would really go on to great things. And they kind of gave up on George.

“A friend of mine who was looking for a job in the Bush junior administration, and was a good friend of the father, went to the father and said, ‘Can you help?’ And the father said, ‘Well, no, talk to his mother. I’ve got no say in this administration’. I mean, I could never find a piece of paper saying this, that maybe the attraction for appointing Rumsfeld was scoring one off dad in that way by Junior.”

By the end, when the war was revealing itself as a disaster, George W Bush finally began to distance himself from Rumsfeld.

By then, Rumsfeld was practising his own form of denial. “For a while, he wouldn’t let his staff use the word insurgents or resistance or quagmire. You know, he thought he could make it all go away just by pretending it wasn’t happening.”

By the end, Bush wanted him to go away as well.

“He was very careful to preserve a direct relationship with Bush, he wouldn’t let any other senior defence officials meet with Bush unless he was there or have one-on-one meetings with Bush. He had a personal meeting one-on-one with Bush every week. He was a courtier, really. So he was very careful to preserve that relationship.

“Bush was dumb, but he was, in some ways, quite a clever politician. So he knew that 9/11 saved the Bush presidency. They were going down the tubes otherwise. The whole sort of martial image, we’re going to war – Bush loved all that. And he played into that. So they were all a team. I think then it slowly dawned on Bush that the Iraq War had turned into a fiasco, a disaster, and it slowly dawned on Bush, that the whole thing was ruining him and his legacy, his presidency.

“I think Bush would have liked to have gotten rid of him sooner than he did. But [Dick] Cheney wouldn’t let that happen. Or persuaded him not to because getting rid of Rumsfeld was a confession of failure for all of them. And eventually, they did get rid of him and put in [Robert] Gates, because he was so manifestly incompetent. By the end, Bush didn’t think very much of him at all because he had been such a disaster.”