From the WaPo, a compendium of
Rumsfeldia delivered to this morning's talk show circuit:
"It's clearly a tragic day for America ... In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days," Rumsfeld said. "But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated"...
Rumsfeld blamed different elements for the surge in violence against the American occupation.
"We know why they're doing it," Rumsfeld said. "There are criminals in that country who will do things for money. There are foreign terrorists in that country ... who have come back in from Iran and are trying to kill people. And there are the remnants of the Baathist regime. And they want to take that country back, and they're not going to. They're not going to come close to taking that country back."
"And they are the ones who want to have the kind of a dictatorship that Saddam Hussein had...
Referring to the dead and injured, he told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "what they're doing is important. What they are doing is taking the battle to the terrorists."
We could spend hours dissecting this, but here are a few observations.
First, doesn't saying we're in a "long, hard war" contradict everything we were told to expect before the war, and what President Top Gun announced last spring when that Navy pilot dropped his load on the aircraft carrier? Since when does "Mission Accomplished" equal "long, hard war?"
Second, just who is attacking our soldiers, and why? Rumsfeld says it's criminals in the country, the Baathists who previously controlled the country, and the terrorists who have entered the country from outside the country and are not motivated by Baathism or by money. No quarrel here--there appears to be wide sympathy for the attacks on Americans, but there isn't sufficient proof to establish that the attacks have the widespread involvement you would see in an organized popular resistance like the anti-colonial movements of the 1930's-1970's (although it's probably only a matter of time for popular resistance to get more organized.) So Rumsfeld's three categories of attackers, with three very different goals and motivations, do probably account for most of the attacks on American soldiers. But how does it follow that "they are the ones who want to have the kind of a dictatorship that Saddam Hussein had," when only the Baathists would want a Baathist dictatorship?
Finally, there's the issue of who's taking the battle to whom. If foreign terrorist have come into Iraq from Iran only after the American overthrow of Saddam's government, we're not taking the fight to them, they're bringing the fight to us. Our soldiers are in an inhospitable environment where they were already under attack from Baathists, criminals and possibly an anti-Baathist popular resistance. Now they've got to deal with terrorists.
Time Magazine asked this week if Rumsfeld is losing his mojo. It's a revealing question coming from the mainstream press. Mojo is often misunderstood to mean libido, or more accurately to mean luck. But it also describes a small sack containing magic items that enable its carrier to conjure up spells. Any clear-eyed skeptic could see that Rumsfeld and the PNAC/neo-con ideologues were deceiving Americans, and probably themselves about the ease with which we would manage the occupation of Iraq. Now that we've had the single second worst day of American casualties since the war began, its becoming clearer to the American press and the American public that they were deceived. But Time's use of the term mojo is an implicit attempt to exonerate the press and the majority of Americans by suggesting they fell for the deception because Rumsfeld had some kind of powerful mojo, and now that opinion is turning against the war it must be because Rumsfeld is losing his mojo. But Donald Rumsfeld didn't have any mojo. He simply lied, and enough people fell for it that now we're in this mess.
A mojo bag loses its power if its carrier spills its contents, and a common idiom suggests that lies lose their power when one spills the truth. One of the real tragedies of this war is that it's required American soldiers like the sixteen we know died this morning to spill their blood before the press and the American people would begin to see that this war has been built on lies.