Donald Rumsfeld: Getting Better at Dancing Around the Truth

One of the ways you could tell President Bush knew the intelligence wasn't there to go into Iraq was the careful way his pre-war speeches were phrased. He knew there would be a day when we all realized the preemptive strike on Iraq was a crock, so he'd say things like "British intelligence has determined." This was in addition to the many times when Bush officials flat-out lied to the American public to get us into this disastrous war. Ultimately, what the White House sold was a toxic mixture of artful deception and basic bullshit. Dick Cheney was one who thrived on the latter, and Condi was a close second. Donald Rumsfeld was right there in the mix, too. The recent confrontation from a questioner in the crowd at one of Donald Rumsfeld's speeches - someone who had worked in Intelligence - highlighted the level of Rumsfeld's mendacity. In the run-up to the war, Donald not only said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but that we knew where they were. He was lying then and he was lying again when he denied having said it.
But let's give him credit: He's working harder to elevate his game. He's trying more for the carefully constructed statements that allow Bush officials to appear to speak definitively but with some built-in wiggle room. Take Donald's recent statement about Zarqawi: "Arguably over the last several years, no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi," said Rumsfeld. So he's saying you could make the argument but he's holding back from making it definitively himself, and I think I know why. On some level - maybe even subconscious - Donald Rumsfeld knows it's not true. See, a preemptive strike kills innocent people, as well. It's tough to justify under the best of circumstances, and to have all the reasons turn out to be wrong is even more of a problem. If you went to your neighbor's house and murdered him and then told the police you did it because he was building a weapon to kill you, you'd go to prison - especially if no weapon could be found. The War on Iraq was outside the rule of law and Rumsfeld knows it. They sold it as revenge for 9/11 but now they claim they never really said that. Their statements were deliberately misleading, and they knew it. This was a "Might makes right" thing. The reason Rumsfeld doesn't say Zarqawi has the blood of more innocent people on his hands than anyone else, is that Rumsfeld knows there are several hundred thousand dead Iraqis who would be alive if this war hadn't happened. He knows the blood is on his hands, the President's hands, and everyone else who marketed this fiasco to the American People. You might feel the Iraqis are not innocent, so let me give you one example: A girl, 5 to 7 years old was also killed in the raid on Zarqawi. She had to be innocent, and if the United States was going to come to her country and kill her, we should have at least been in the right. Instead, we were wrong - not arguably wrong - just plain wrong. And somewhere in Rumsfeld's weird, twisted brain, he knows it.