Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led his country's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush, has died at the age of 88 in New Mexico, his family announced Wednesday.
Rumsfeld died days before his 89th birthday, and only a few days after US President Joe Biden received his Afghan counterpart, Ashraf Ghani, amid the start of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, whose name was associated with the war in it. Who is Donald Rumsfeld?
Born in Chicago in 1932, Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton University, and served in the US Army from 1954 to 1957.
In 1960, he won his first term as a Republican congressman from Illinois. He resigned in 1969 and took up a position in the administration of former President Richard Nixon, according to his biography in Congress, according to what was reported by the American newspaper, "US Today".
In 1975, Rumsfeld was named the thirteenth Secretary of Defense — the youngest person to hold that position in the country's history, according to the Defense Department's historical website. President Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After 23 years in the private sector, Rumsfeld will return to his former role as the 21st Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration in January 2001.
Leading the war in Afghanistan and Iraq
On September 11, just months after Bush's arrival at the White House, and after the attacks on the International Trade Center towers located in Manhattan and the headquarters of the US Department of Defense, Rumsfeld participated in a high-level effort, along with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, to wage war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In 2003, with the beginning of the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became an unexpected star of the war, frequenting the American media, which favored his press conferences. The Wall Street Journal described him as the architect of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
He offered his resignation after the abuses committed by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but George Bush rejected it, according to Agence France-Presse.
By 2006, the war and Rumsfeld's handling of it had become Bush's political responsibility.
Bush fired Rumsfeld shortly after the midterm elections, and left after losing all political support, according to a report from USA Today.
Rumsfeld returned to the private sector after leaving the department, and wrote his memoirs. He also published many of his papers at that time and appeared in the media, and he remained one of the most controversial figures of the war period.
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