Eyes wide shut

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2016 (Getty)

No love lost for Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of Shock & Awe, the worst strategic initiative this country has ever done (aka brain fart) but this isn't the first time US foreign policy erred as seen by Nam, a fiasco of biblical proportions also started by a lie like that of W's Shock & Awe.

Because while Rumsfeld might have (mostly) vanished from public life 15 years ago, his vision of defense policy lived on. To be sure, the military is still vast and lumbering. But the doctrine of preemptively attacking terrorists with as little manpower as possible, sans the nation-building Rumsfeld so deplored, has now been institutionalized at the highest levels of government. The result has been a war on terror fought remotely and without end. Its initial idealism — we will ‘rid the world of evil!’ as President Bush tub-thumped after 9/11 — has given way to a slow burn of aerial attacks and killings, roiling nations while ensuring both that we never quite win and never quite lose.

All the presidents since Bush have pledged to repudiate Rumsfeld in some way, yet none have managed to do so. Instead they’ve only cemented his legacy (what could be lighter and nimbler than a drone strike?). And it’s here that we arrive back at all those obituaries. A writer at the Nation, for example, excoriates Rumsfeld because the airstrikes he ordered against Iraq ‘kept managing to hit funeral processions and wedding parties and markets’. The Saudis committed similar atrocities in Yemen with full support and weapons provided by the Obama administration. Yet somehow it’s difficult to imagine the Nation — good work though they do — eulogizing Obama with even a shred of the opprobrium they reserved for Rumsfeld.

Obama started an illegal war that helped wreck Libya, inflamed the violence in Syria, godfathered our modern drone war, had an American citizen assassinated and wielded the Espionage Act as a weapon against whistleblowers and journalists. Yet is the Atlantic ever going to malign his brutality and incompetence the same way they just did Rumsfeld’s? Is New York magazine? Will Hillary Clinton be trashed upon her death for convincing Obama to invade Libya? Will John Kerry be filleted for his warmongering against Bashar al-Assad? What about Madeleine Albright and her rationalization of our de facto genocide against the Iraqis in 1996? Will that even make her obit amid all the predictable ‘Madam Secretary’ nonsense?

 

The reason Rumsfeld is being attacked isn’t just because he was a failed warlord, though he was. It’s because he’s an easy piñata. He’s a convenient scapegoat for all of America’s foreign policy failures over the last 20 years, even as he was only in office for five of them. Arrogant, self-assured, white, male, right-wing, no longer able to hit back — who better to absorb all of our Mesopotamian sins and carry them off into the wilderness? Trashing him exposes the double standard that the Establishment applies to public figures it likes. It enables the left to ignore that Rumsfeldism has become systemic inside the same government whose expansion they view as salvific.

Eyes wide shut indeed.