Rarely has something in your paper disturbed me as much as Donald Rumsfeld’s self-serving attempt to explain away his failings and those of this administration.
Rumsfeld attempts to mislead by talking of the war on terror as if all the actions taken since Sept. 11, 2001, have been motivated solely by a desire for our security.
Afghanistan and Iraq are not the same and are not component parts of a coherent plan. This administration has largely abandoned Afghanistan to chase the deadly shadows in Iraq.
He then tries to draw parallels between our misadventures in Iraq and the Korean War and speaks glowingly of liberation. The comparison between Iraq and Korea could not be more poorly drawn. The Korean War was a response to immediate aggression, with clear objectives and commenced under United Nations authority in furtherance of a defined U.S. policy–containment in this case. The mess in Iraq involves none of these factors. There was no aggression, no threat, no defined objectives, no international authority and no fundamental U.S. interests, only a bizarre neo-conservative desire to re-engineer the political dynamic of the Middle East.
And liberation? I didn’t realize Rumsfeld cared so for the world’s downtrodden.
But wait. Wasn’t he the one who guaranteed bulletproof evidence of apocalyptic weapons in Iraq? Wasn’t he the one who made Iraq the objective within hours of the events on that tragic Tuesday morning? Yet he expressed no concern for Iraq’s huddled masses then and did not do so until all of the reasons for his pathetic little war disappeared in smoke and blood.
Liberation indeed.
