War Criminal Gets Hurtled Into the Great Known Unknown

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Once upon a time, it could've been that the late Donald Rumsfeld wanted to be a true patriot. Maybe he even had pretensions of being a great American. But sometime during the nearly quarter century between his first and last phases of public service, when he was a corporate fuck doll, Donald Rumsfeld decided he wanted to be a neocon, instead.

    In some ways, he was wildly successful. Unlike his first tenure under Ford as Defense Secretary, then the youngest ever, the second time he got not only one war on but two of them. Invading Afghanistan then Iraq under false pretenses was the biggest foreign policy SNAFU since we thought we could defeat the Vietcong in their own jungles using conventional warfare strategies.

   Without knowing it at the time, the war in Afghanistan would be the longest one in US history, costing us trillions with nothing to show for it. It's been nearly 20 years and under Biden, we're still not completely out and won't be until the end of August. Donald Rumsfeld's poisonous legacy is the very nightmare version of the Butterfly Effect. A dragon flaps its wings and an ancient nation in Central Asia gets swept away.

     Afghanistan's security forces, or what passes for them, plainly had no plan for our post-exit strategy. After 20 years, thousands of US lives and trillions of dollars, the Taliban, a regional terrorist rump organization, is now encroaching on Kabul and other key cities and territories like hungry wolves. Long before we decided to withdraw, during the Obama years, we were forced to bribe the Taliban with taxpayer dollars to keep them from attacking our convoys. Trump wanted to negotiate with them at Camp David, a plan so absurd even John Bolton had had enough and quit.

     Iraq was an even bigger debacle, largely because of the greater loss of life, the billion dollar US embassy built with slave labor and the historically-bad PR of our embracing torture as a legitimate interrogation tool. Rummy was all onboard with that and more. In a Washington Post article from nearly 20 years ago, Rumsfeld had described a meeting with Bush before they were installed in office:

     "Many months earlier, in the formative stages of his new administration, Bush had talked with his prospective secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, about their shared belief that America's deterrent strength had been eroded through misapplication of the country's military power. Rumsfeld recalls saying to Bush that whenever the United States was attacked or threatened, the Clinton administration had followed a pattern of 'reflexive pullback.' Rumsfeld said he believed that U.S. power was needed to help discipline the world."

     In other words, in some deeply convoluted Kiplingesque jingoism, Rumsfeld decided the world couldn't survive without American military discipline, that we white men should take up the burden for the poor brown people who plainly can't be trusted to govern their own affairs. In fact, the WaPo article's headline was, "We will rally the world."

You Go to War With the Defense Secretary You Have

 

Instead, we were reviled as war criminals. We immediately ran afoul of the Geneva Convention's prohibition on torture as well as virtually every international treaty and in contravention of the UN Security Council's guidelines. The month after Colin Powell's dog and pony show before that same UN in which he showed raw anthrax that didn't exist made in mobile weapons labs that weren't any more real, we invaded the ancient city of Baghdad, setting about the disbanding of their military (and in the process, creating a ready-made, well-trained and well-armed insurgency) and commencing the murder of upwards of a million Iraqi civilians...

     ...just so we could get back the oil and gas fields that Saddam had nationalized in 1973. In fact, remembering the debacle under his father's own invasion, Bush even told the Iraqis when our illegal invasion had begun, "Don't burn the oil fields." The original name for the invasion was "Operation Iraqi Liberation", or OIL for short.

     But the nation around whom the world would rally and, to us Dick Cheney's now-infamous phrase, "greet us as liberators" couldn't even adequately train the Afghani and Iraqi security forces after all those years. On our withdrawal, Afghanistan will collapse as quickly as had South Vietnam after we'd left Saigon in '75. ISIS, the former al Qaeda, is practically baked into Iraq's political infrastructure.

     Rummy was a part of that. And if you want insight as to why we couldn't train those security forces after hastily crushing their military, consider how poorly our troops were provisioned immediately after the invasion. Shoddy helmets and body armor, incomplete combat training, unarmored Humvees providing but sandbags and plywood to defend the troops within them from bullets and IEDs.

    And war criminals like Eddie Gallagher and others torturing and murdering natives with impunity.

    Rummy made that. In 2002, Afghandata.org released an early report that showed a horrendously high civilian death count in Afghanistan thanks largely to now-illegal cluster bombs. Part of the horror of that was that these highly destructive weapons were wrapped in bright yellow plastic, the same material as the food shipments we were also dropping on Afghanistan.

   Then Rummy publicly affirmed that, despite hungry Afghani children running up to the cluster bombs expecting food, we would not stop using them.Then, long after Rummy was kicked out of the Pentagon the day after the 2006 midterms, Obama had his "surge" and ramped up our drone strike program to nightmarish proportions. "Graveyard of empires"? What is this "graveyard of empires" of which you speak, stranger?

     So, yes, Donald Rumsfeld may have once had aspirations to be a great American. Now he's going to have to explain to St. Peter (or, more likely, appealing to the guy downstairs) what went wrong along the way. And while he's at it, he can also explain why he thought it was a good idea to buy and settle into the house in which Frederick Douglass was tortured for a year.

     No, Rummy never became a great American. The closest he could come to that was buying the home of a man who was, a man who was tortured in that house just as Rummy had tortured so many Iraqis and Afghanis.