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Elder Bush criticizes Cheney, Rumsfeld for hard-line views, poor service

Xinhua, November 6, 2015 Adjust font size:

Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush strongly criticized former Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for their hard-line views and poor service to his son, former President George W. Bush, U.S. media reported Thursday.

In a newly released biography about the elder Bush, the 41st president of the U.S., Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Jon Meacham revealed that Bush also faulted his son, the 43rd president, for using "hot rhetoric" on the world stage.

The elder Bush said that such rhetoric may get headlines but "it doesn't necessarily solve the diplomatic problem," Meacham writes in the book entitled "Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush."

Bush referred to his son's 2002 State of the Union address, in which he called Iraq, Iran and Democratic People's Republic of Korea as an "axis of evil."

"You go back to the 'axis of evil' and these things and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything," Bush said.

Commenting on Cheney, who was also his own defense secretary, the elder Bush chided him for asserting too much hard-line influence on his son, the 43rd president, especially after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush said Cheney "had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer." "He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," he said.

He added that Cheney became a hard-charging guy who wanted "to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East."

On Rumsfeld, the elder Bush also blasted the hawkish former Pentagon chief for serving his son "badly."

"I don't like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything," he said.

But Bush declined to criticize his son for launching the invasion into Iraq in 2003, in which Cheney and Rumsfeld were believed to play a crucial role.

The Iraq War was launched on the basis of what proved to be false intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the U.S. and its allies. The war was brought to an formal end in December 2011 when President Barack Obama pulled out all U.S. troops from the country.

The Iraq War has been widely criticized as it has devastated the country by killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including civilians, and displacing millions of others. About 4,500 American service members were also killed.

After the U.S. pullout, the terror group Islamic State surged in Iraq by taking over large swathes of land which have fallen under its brutal rule.

The U.S. has launched airstrikes since August 2014 against IS targets in a bid to block its rapid advances against areas controlled by the Iraqi government. Endit