THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary who sent American forces to war alongside British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, has criticised President Barack Obama for undermining the relationship between the two close allies."My impression is that the Obama administration is taking steps that at least symbolically have distanced his White House from what I have throughout my career valued as a special relationship," Mr Rumsfeld told The Sunday Telegraph.
"I don't know what it looks like from the other side of the pond, but certainly here it has dramatised the things that the Obama administration has done that are unhelpful to the relationship."
The former defence secretary cited Mr Obama's actions and words, from his early removal of the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office to his recent assertion that the US does not have "have a stronger friend and stronger ally" than France.
"It seems gratuitous to me," Mr Rumsfeld said last week in an interview to coincide with publication of Known and Unknown, his 730-page memoir of his time in office under President George W Bush. The book, the latest in a series of insider accounts from those who served in the Bush administration, went straight to number one on Amazon, the online bookseller.
President Obama's glowing reference to French allies was particularly galling for the veteran Republican official who had taken a very different view - dismissing both France and Germany as "problems" and "old Europe" when they opposed the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. >>> Philip Sherwell, New York | Sunday, February 13, 2011
