Rumsfeld: the US won’t intervene to stop a civil war in Iraq – they’re going to leave it to the Iraqi government. This means allowing a civil war to happen – if it comes to civil war all the Iraqi military and police forces will be torn apart into the militias that are really running them. The Iraqi military can’t stop a civil war, because it is going to be the battleground.
This isn’t in the official PDF of his testimony [here](http://appropriations.senate.gov/hearmarkups/record.cfm?id=252399), so presumably it was in answer to questions.
What that PDF does include is a particularly blatant statement that Rumsfeld doesn’t want to get human rights or democratisation get in the way of what he sees as the US national interest.
It is also important that we not complicate efforts to build useful relationships with nations that can aid in our defense. In the past, there has been a tendency to cut off military-to-military relationships when a particular government did something we did not approve of. This happened some years ago with respect to our relations with both Indonesia and Pakistan — two of the largest and most important Muslim countries in the world, and today, valuable allies in the War on Terror.
Why did they cut off those relationships? In Pakistan, it was because they were developing nuclear weapons technology – technology which was then transferred to Iran and North Korea. In Indonesia, it was because the government was in the process of killing more than 100,000 people in East Timor.
So Rumsfeld’s message is: feel free to build nukes or murder your citizens – the US won’t let it stand in the way of military cooperation.