Donald Rumsfeld cancelled his NYT subscription because Paul Krugman expressed shame for our response to the 9/11 attack. Michelle Malkin called Krugman a "smug coward" for his commentary. This is some of what Krugman is ashamed of.
Estimates for civilian deaths from the Iraq war range from roughly 100,000 to two thirds of a million. There is a report that 39% of civilians killed by US air raids were children. There is little doubt that tens of thousands of children have been killed as a result of the Iraq war, and that tens upon tens of thousands more have been maimed.
Why did they die or suffer? Because Michelle Malkin and others were afraid of terrorists. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were not even tangentially connected to the 9/11 attack. Cowardly Americans were so frightened that they adopted the strategy of fighting them "over there" so we don't have to fight them here. It mattered not how many lives were lost "over there", so long as we felt safer here. Life is cheap "over there". Only American lives count. Hundreds of thousands of dead or mangled Iraqis was justified to maybe, just maybe, absent any evidence, make us safer. That policy defines cowardice. Look at the photos above, and multiply by thousands upon thousands. It is shameful beyond words.
Rumsfeld's absurd assertion that critics of the Iraq war were "morally and intellectually confused" brings to mind this excerpt from Tolstoy's War and Peace:
"On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began – that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature. Millions of people committed against each other such a countless number of villainies, deceptions, betrayals, thefts, forgeries and distributions of false banknotes, robberies, arson, and murders as the annals of all the law courts in the world could not assemble in whole centuries, and which, at that period of time, the people who committed them did not look upon as crimes."
What we did in Iraq was a crime. A crime that George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Michelle Malkin, et al are proud of. They are actually proud of what directly resulted in the photos above, which are just a microcosm of the atrocities we are responsible for. So tell me, who, exactly, are the morally and intellectually confused? Who are the cowards?
I, for one, am ashamed of our country's response to the attacks on 9/11, and proud of Paul Krugman.