(CNN). Donald Rumsfeld, the acerbic architect of the Iraq war and a master Washington power player who served as US secretary of defense for two presidents, has died at the age of 88.
The pugnacious businessman, bureaucrat and former lawmaker helped drag victims out of the burning Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The al Qaeda attacks heralded the War on Terror and years of foreign entanglements that he directed and that ultimately ended his political career when they went sour.
Rumsfeld died surrounded by his family in “his beloved Taos, New Mexico,” according to a family statement. No cause of death was immediately provided.
A long-time associate of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld made a shock return to the Cabinet when he was named to run the Pentagon by the inexperienced new President George W. Bush, who took office in January 2001.
He had previously served in the role for President Gerald Ford in the 1970s and history will remember him as the youngest and the second-oldest defense secretary.
Rumsfeld had an effervescent personality and could be mischievous and cocky, though critics — including some in the Bush administration — regarded him as arrogant and a bully.
His Washington legacy is dominated by the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld refused to accept blame for or repudiate the conduct of the conflict when conditions deteriorated and US troops faced a vicious insurgency — after the weapons of mass destruction on which the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion in 2003 never materialized. His decision to insist on a “light footprint” for US troops was blamed by many critics for the collapse of the Iraqi state after the US invasion — conditions that fed the insurgency and fractured security. Many of his antagonists also held Rumsfeld responsible for the detainee abuse scandal in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad that severely tarnished America’s reputation abroad.
According to a number of contemporary accounts and memoirs of key players, the then-defense secretary was quick to advise Bush to target Iraq after 9/11 — even though al Qaeda had been sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terror attack.
He had also predicted that a conflict that in the end dragged on for years would be a short war. US troops did topple the Iraqi regime within weeks but Rumsfeld’s critics accused him of having no plan for the aftermath of the invasion.
Rumsfeld died in the week in which President Joe Biden is expected to complete US involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan, which was launched while Rumsfeld was at the Pentagon and is America’s longest war.