Armitage has history of candor, colorful language
By Arshad Mohammed
Reuters Friday, September 22, 2006; 4:59 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bull-necked and blunt-spoken, Richard Armitage has long had a reputation for candor and colorful language even if he never threatened to bomb Pakistan after the September 11 attacks.
The U.S. deputy secretary of state from 2001 until 2005, Armitage on Friday denied Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's claim he threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it refused to cooperate in the war on terrorism.
"I didn't say it," Armitage told CNN. "Never did I threaten to use military force. I was not authorized to."
While some current and former U.S. officials said the comment sounded like something Armitage might have said, they believed his denials and noted he typically expressed himself even more vividly [!].
"It doesn't sound like Rich to me," said Aaron Miller, a former State Department Middle East specialist. "He would have come up with a much more graphic and original formulation."
Armitage's candor brought him deep embarrassment this year when he acknowledged he was the original source in the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.
"It was a terrible error on my part," Armitage told the New York times two weeks ago in an admission that many took as a sign of his honesty.
The Plame case led to an investigation into leaks of her identity that Bush administration critics said were to punish Plame's former diplomat husband for his criticism of how pre-Iraq war intelligence was used.
A weightlifter with the physique of a fireplug, Armitage's career with the U.S. government spanned five decades and included three combat tours in Vietnam and sensitive posts at the Pentagon before he become deputy to former Secretary of State Colin Powell in March 2001.
"The man cussed like a sailor and spoke sense in simple declarative sentences," Powell wrote of Armitage his 1995 autobiography. "Big, bald, brassy, built like an anvil, he looked as if he could step into the ring next Saturday at the World Federation of Wrestling."
By all accounts, Armitage worked fiercely to defend Powell during his four years in the Bush administration, which were marked by infighting -- particularly between the Pentagon and the State Department -- over issues from Iraq to North Korea.
Asked about some of his boss's more conservative critics in 2001, Armitage called them: "Pissants who have never served in uniform."
When told, in October 2004, about a newspaper report that then Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had killed six people in Baghdad, Armitage replied: "I've got an eight-letter word for it."
"Does it begin with b?" a journalist asked.
"No, it begins with n ... nonsense," Armitage replied.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092201077.html>
Carl
"My solution to the problem [of North Vietnam] would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."
-- General Curtis E. LeMay, "Mission with LeMay: My Story," p. 565 (1965)