[lit-ideas] Re: Three Blind Mice (was: On the prospect of World Peace)
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 10:39:53 -0700
Lawrence,
For the last six months or so, it was amusing when you called me a unamerican liberal
leftist defeatist ballroom-dancing lesbian pacifist.
Yes, it amused me, because it meant you were losing. It meant my arrows were flying true.
Instead of supporting Bush in Iraq, you defended him. That's a difference.
But when Bush spoke in Chicago, the war turned yet again. No longer "stay the course". It's
now "okay, we lost, so who do we blame?" The debacle in Lebanon underscored this failure of
strategy.
Who's strategy? Rumsfeld, of course. Cheney is the grand architect; Rumsfeld is the engineer
who implements the strategy.
All the theory has been blown aside: Fukuyama, Huntington, Jeffersonian democracy, etc. We
all, all of us, both Bush and those against Bush, incl. the rest of the world, and yes, bin
Laden in his cave, see the truth: the war was a failure from the beginning. The theories
were used only to cover up that basic failure.
And now you move to the next step: In the bunker, surrounded by advancing enemy, you
denounce everyone as traitors.
For the last five years, the Bushies have argued that facts don't matter. It's faith-based
government, and faith-based war. "Trust us." "We know what we're doing."
Well, facts are back. Read the following. If you reply with name-calling, well, then I'll
smile. Because once again, the arrow flew true.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
Donald Rumsfeld's Dance With the Nazis
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 03 September 2006
President Bush came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win
some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken
that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats,
Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.
Last week the man who gave us "stuff happens" and "you go to war with the Army you have"
outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics
of the Iraq debacle to those who "ridiculed or ignored" the rise of the Nazis in the 1930's
and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a "moral or intellectual
confusion" and fail to recognize the "new type of fascism" represented by terrorists.
Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of "Defeatocrats" but also the first
President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last
month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.
What made Mr. Rumsfeld's speech noteworthy wasn't its toxic effort to impugn the
patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run
surrender and incipient treason. That's old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld's performance
special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now
and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its
record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer
than America's fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.
Here's how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler's appeasers to score his cheap
points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain's hand at Munich in
1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the
December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of
Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he
thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just
too shameless to care?
Mr. Rumsfeld didn't go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he
had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align
itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr.
Rumsfeld's trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator's use of torture -
"beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" - on hundreds of
political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American
intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and
Iranians.
According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld's Baghdad
meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr.
Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can
be viewed online at George Washington University's National Security Archive.) Within a year
of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed
diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of
American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.
In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants
is "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." He can quote Churchill
all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the
record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone.
To borrow the defense secretary's own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about
Saddam.
Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have
appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn't recognize the
severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would
not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.
For further proof, read the address Mr. Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon workers on Sept. 10,
2001 - a policy manifesto he regarded as sufficiently important, James Bamford reminds us in
his book "A Pretext to War," that it was disseminated to the press. "The topic today is an
adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of
America" is how the defense secretary began. He then went on to explain that this adversary
"crushes new ideas" with "brutal consistency" and "disrupts the defense of the United
States." It is a foe "more subtle and implacable" than the former Soviet Union, he
continued, stronger and larger and "closer to home" than "the last decrepit dictators of the
world."
And who might this ominous enemy be? Of that, Mr. Rumsfeld was as certain as he would
later be about troop strength in Iraq: "the Pentagon bureaucracy." In love with the sound of
his own voice, he blathered on for almost 4,000 words while Mohamed Atta and the 18 other
hijackers fanned out to American airports.
Three months later, Mr. Rumsfeld would still be asleep at the switch, as his war command
refused to heed the urgent request by American officers on the ground for the additional
troops needed to capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora. What would
follow in Iraq was also more Chamberlain than Churchill. By failing to secure and rebuild
the country after the invasion, he created a terrorist haven where none had been before.
That last story is seeping out in ever more incriminating detail, thanks to well-sourced
chronicles like "Fiasco," "Cobra II" and "Blood Money," T. Christian Miller's new account of
the billions of dollars squandered and stolen in Iraq reconstruction. Still, Americans have
notoriously short memories. The White House hopes that by Election Day it can induce amnesia
about its failures in the Middle East as deftly as Mr. Rumsfeld (with an assist from John
Mark Karr) helped upstage first-anniversary remembrances of Katrina.
One obstacle is that White House allies, not just Democrats, are sounding the alarm
about Iraq. In recent weeks, prominent conservatives, some still war supporters and some
not, have steadily broached the dread word Vietnam: Chuck Hagel, William F. Buckley Jr. and
the columnists Rich Lowry and Max Boot. A George Will column critical of the war so rattled
the White House that it had a flunky release a public 2,400-word response notable for its
incoherence.
If even some conservatives are making accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, one
way for the administration to drown them out is to step up false historical analogies of its
own, like Mr. Rumsfeld's. In the past the administration has been big on comparisons between
Iraq and the American Revolution - the defense secretary once likened "the snows of Valley
Forge" to "the sandstorms of central Iraq" - but lately the White House vogue has been for
"Islamo-fascism," which it sees as another rhetorical means to retrofit Iraq to the more
salable template of World War II.
"Islamo-fascism" certainly sounds more impressive than such tired buzzwords as "Plan for
Victory" or "Stay the Course." And it serves as a handy substitute for "As the Iraqis stand
up, we'll stand down." That slogan had to be retired abruptly last month after The New York
Times reported that violence in Baghdad has statistically increased rather than decreased as
American troops handed over responsibilities to Iraqis. Yet the term "Islamo-fascists," like
the bygone "evildoers," is less telling as a description of the enemy than as a window into
the administration's continued confusion about exactly who the enemy is. As the writer Katha
Pollitt asks in The Nation, "Who are the 'Islamo-fascists' in Saudi Arabia - the current
regime or its religious-fanatical opponents?"
Next up is the parade of presidential speeches culminating in what The Washington Post
describes as "a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites": All Fascism All the Time. In
his opening salvo, delivered on Thursday to the same American Legion convention that cheered
Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush worked in the Nazis and Communists and compared battles in Iraq to
Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. He once more interchanged the terrorists who struck the World
Trade Center with car bombers in Baghdad, calling them all part of the same epic
"ideological struggle of the 21st century." One more drop in the polls, and he may yet
rebrand this mess War of the Worlds.
"Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists," said the congressman John Murtha in
succinct rebuttal to the president's speech. "It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis."
And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is
that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle
against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this
quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq -
now more than 2,600 - is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five
years ago.
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