Nil Nisi Bonum Department

 

Gerald Ford's chief of staff Don Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy Dick Cheney, 1975. Photo by Harvey Georges/AP, via The New York Times.

In defense of that vile reprobate Donald Rumsfeld, now on his final journey to whichever circle of Hell it is that houses those who believe their own parochial interests outweigh the suffering of millions, it is not at all true that he spoke incomprehensible gobbledygook in the way Sarah Jones suggests in her otherwise excellent farewell note in New York:

Iraq will be Rumsfeld’s legacy, with all of the lies, all of the torture, all of the killing. While many hands bear responsibility for such loss, two belonged to Rumsfeld, who had Saddam Hussein in his sights for years before 9/11 gave him the excuse he’d wanted to attack Iraq. Rumsfeld lived out the rest of his days with his impunity. His victims weren’t so lucky.

He's probably a handsaw too

Red-tailed Hawk taking flight in the Marin Headlands, with the Golden Gate Bridge in background. Photo by George Eade/Golden Gate Raptor Observatory.

Trump's national security adviser James Woolsey was on BBC earlier (you might find the audio here) saying if you want to know how Trump is going to handle foreign policy issues you shouldn't look at anything he said during the campaign; he seemed to think was a very silly idea to judge a candidate on the basis of the candidate's public statements. He said we should be looking forward, to the particular problems he's going to face. The answer, my friends, is in the future.

In private, he said, Trump is very calm and judicious about foreign policy. Personally I have some questions about Woolsey, Bill Clinton's first Director of Central Intelligence who was forced to quit, it seems, after the exposure of the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, because of his refusal to hold anyone accountable in the agency for Ames's destruction of CIA operations in the Soviet Union and then Russian Federation. He was a member of PNAC and an anxious booster of the Iraq War, going on TV to blame Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks hours after they took place, and a participant in war profiteering (Booz Allen, Paladin Capital, Lux Capital).

He decided to support Trump, we read, because of Trump's big plans for upping spending on weapons systems in all four branches of the service:

“I think the problem is her budget,” Woolsey said of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “She is spending so much money on domestic programs — including ones that we don’t even have now, and the ones we have now are underfunded — I think there can be very little room for the improvements in defense and intelligence that have to be made.”

Woolsey has previously called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”

Anybody who didn't want to vote for Clinton because they've heard she's a hawk and Trump after all was such a vigorous opponent of the Iraq War and has such a peaceable approach to the Syria situation (except for the people over there he wants to "bomb the shit out of") and to Ukraine and getting rid of NATO and so forth, here's somebody who's spoken to Trump about these issues claiming to know more about than you do, and suggesting you shouldn't have trusted what Trump said on the stump. And guess what, judging from the number of demonstrable lies Trump told on the stump the odds are Woolsey is right on this one.

Tony Blair, War Criminal

Drawing by Jon Stich, 2014: "I did this sketch of a vampire on the flight home from LA. It kind of looks more like a psychopathic Tony Blair though, which I’m okay with."

War criminal Tony Blair in his address today:

The decision to go to war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power in a coalition of over 40 countries led by the USA, was the hardest, most momentous, most agonising decision I took in 10 years as British prime minister.

For that decision today I accept full responsibility, without exception and without excuse.

And then proceeds to list his exceptions and excuses for what seems likely to be hours of self-justifying and lies. I heard him going on about how the Iraqi military just unexpectedly "melted away" in the face of the invasion, for instance, leaving the Iraqi public defenseless against an eruption of Sunni-Shi'a conflict, without somehow remembering old Proconsul Bremer's orders to disband the Iraqi army and "de-Baathify" the government (which literally created the Sunni "insurgency" when it deprived all those skilled and angry and in many cases extremely violent people of their livelihoods).

For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know or can believe.

No, we know exactly how much you express.

And earlier, in his prepared statement:

West of Eden: Green Zone update

Sadrists invading the legislature. Photo via Al-Jazeera.

Faithful readers had a chance to learn about this weekend's startling news from Baghdad a month before it happened (as blogfriend MBouffant showed up to notice in comments there), or sort of, when I reported the beginnings of a mass joint Sunni-Shi'a protest movement threatening to break into the Iraqi capital's high-security Green Zone, where foreign VIPs and local politicians are normally able to cut their deals without fear of getting blown up or kidnaped. Or contemplating the faces of thousands of victims of their corruption and irresponsibility.

And now they're in the Green Zone, after I'd more or less thought the whole thing must have fizzled out already, and they're attracting the attention of the New York Times. They've busted in in the hundreds and perhaps thousands, mostly nonviolently and perhaps with the collusion of sympathetic security forces, and rioted inside the Parliament itself, breaking some furniture. So you can say you heard about it here first, if you did.

I seem to be virtually alone in regarding this as a positive development. Atrios and BooMan are sadly rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, and with good reason, over this new evidence of the endless chaos caused by George W. Bush and his companions. I agree it's that, but I think it's something more, as I've been trying to say...

White House Fool Report: Please can we indict Bremer now?

NYTimes: Investigation Into Missing Iraqi Cash Ended in Lebanon Bunker

I mean, I totally get how you might not want to prosecute somebody for torture, it just sounds so horribly harsh and negative. Feelings would be bound to get hurt.

But Proconsul Bremer calmly watched as several billion of my tax dollars slipped into the aether. "Oops, all that money's gone off somewhere. We'd better have some more, right away!"

He wasn't even curious about where it was going?

Image by cat-harman92 at DeviantArt.

White House fool report:

Image from Mi Ex es una Meme.

Hey Mr. P,

You're trolling me, right? At the Palais des Beaux-Arts? As quoted in Slate?

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there.

Broken eggs

Image via Rockying.

Anti–Tom Friedman writes:*

ANTAKYA--Here in the most famous Syrian city not actually in Syria, the coffee house wags are saying what Syria needs is Saddam Hussein. No, not in Syria, in Iraq.

Because while Westerners may like to think that the conflict in Syria is an outgrowth of the so-called Arab Spring and the hunger for democracy, [jump]

NYT idiocy

From BEN HUBBARD, ROBERT F. WORTH and MICHAEL R. GORDON:

But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.

Ah yes, remember when there was a broker with the power and the will to contain the region's sectarian hatreds? I don't. I remember when US forces were in Iraq making the situation worse. It's because of their coming in 2003 that the current instability exists, and it would exist in some different but equally violent form if our troops were still there.

Garbage slums of Fallujah. Photo by Michael Totten.

Judge not, lest ye be Friedman

Yes, it's Thomas P. Friedman, more frequently addressed as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cholericus, with yet another insight to offer to an astounded public.

Aireekah at regretsy.

This one has to do with his wrath, for the Mustache is wrathful today. He is downright sparked off, in fact. We haven't seen him so indignantly quivering since the Iraq War ended in May 2003.

Yes, of course, May 2003. When did you think the war ended? He took his mustache onto the Charlie Rose show to announce it, on the very same day, May 29, as [jump]

Pace, pace

The war in Iraq passed away quietly last week, after a long wasting illness, surrounded by friends and family and fortified with the comforts of religion...

Actually it only ever had one friend worth having, and one relative. The friend was the great journalist Christopher Hitchens, who took to it early for reasons nobody could ever quite understand--a mocking whim or a genuine perverse passion--and remained loyal to it until the end, which came by some uncanny coincidence at the same time as his own (and no comforts of religion for him, but it seems worth saying RIP all the same); the relative was an older sister, a war in Afghanistan, more decorous and discreet--more legal, to put it bluntly--and more than a little resentful, it was said, at the younger one's careless, flashy, attention-grabbing ways.

Peace, peace, my God... suffering... a fatal crime... the curse! the curse!