"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty."
"I don't do quagmires."
"I don't do diplomacy."
"I don't do foreign policy."
"I don't do numbers."
The above are direct quotes. They come directly out of America's corporate heartland from a man whose "accomplishment" at G. D Searle was in terrorizing the sort of people who don't matter and getting a sweetener approved that may cause brain tumors, destroying careers to do so.
It has long been a right-wing fashion to blame government for everything, but the above make it clear that Rumsfeld was very much a creature of a corporate world which, during and directly after the Cold War, was expanding into an economic vacuum created by the Second World War, in which all that mattered was manipulating what other people thought.
This world was so hegemonic that Job One, not only for the CEO but also for the white collar, became the capillary management of one's public relations image.
"Reason" turned inside out and became strictly a matter of managing one's biography, and only fools and losers continued to be concerned with the external world.
"Subjective" and "objective" reversed polarity. "Subjectivity" became a term of abuse hurled at unwanted results such as Shinseki's estimate of how many troops it would take to pacify Iraq. "Objectivity" becamse the name of success in maintaining one's reputation and the body count of careers destroyed to do so.
The world was referred to as complex and unmanageable whenever the results from the field were negative. But any attempt to actually master complexity became to the province of little people trying, the night before the Big Presentation, to figure out how to survive Rumsfeld's illogical, off-topic, and incoherent objections. History became myth: a big man versus a little man, with Goliath the winner at all times, and Isaac sacrificed after all.
Upon the accessing of Monkey Boy, things took a decided turn into utter absurdity. This book has GWB, well into his Presidency, asking his father what a "neocon" was. Other reports have Rove chairing discussions on how to cut Medicare and Medicaid by men who could not tell you the difference between these "entitlements". Rumsfeld himself was bone Midwestern ignorant at an early age and did not learn on the job: early in his career, he decided (using American business logic) that Paul Nitze, an archetypical Cold Warrior, must be soft on the Soviets because he knew so much about them, because in American business logic, knowing too much about any one thing is bad for the pure of heart generalist.
This came about, with grievous consequences for America from the standpoint of national self-interest alone (such as the total loss of leadership of the home hemisphere), because in the USA, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Enlightenment's descent into biography, hagiography, demonology, haruspication, and myth, was at its most Power-Pointed advanced.
Political life became for Players a sort of blood sport with invisible umpires nonetheless presumed to be there, in the peanut gallery of the press and poll.
Of course, no poll could have been conducted prior to March 2003 to haruspicate the reaction of the Iraqi people to the Americans barging in. For one thing, Saddam would have had a fit. For another, the barging-in rendered moot for Iraqis whatever they may have felt before the war, for owing to Rumsfeld's incompetence and malignity, not one-tenth of the riches perhaps anticipated showed up for the Iraqis. Instead, the country became a hell on earth.
Rumsfeld knew this, if he knew little else despite his expensive stay at Princeton (not graced to my knowledge except by wrestling stardom, when Rumsfeld could have wrestled at the "Rock Welcomes You" gym on Van Buren Street around the time of his matriculation, and hopefully got his neck broken, saving us a lot of trouble and the taxpayers alone a lot of money).
He was of a generation accustomed to having its own way in the world. If Aspartame would make them look good, then Aspartame had to be approved by the FDA. If an underpowered invasion would give him the status of a Douglas Macarthur, then that invasion had to proceed.
3000 American service personnel are dead as a result. 24000 are wounded and according to recent reports many of them rot in corridors at Walter Reed. Several hundred thousand Iraqis are dead.
It's almost ungrammatical of Cockburn to say that Rumsfeld accepts responsibility but not blame: it may be that he would accept blame but not responsibility. A man so uncaring of people has a concomitant lack of care for language except to manipulate and to bully, so Rumsfeld would split what Derrida would call the diferance either way.
This man is now in a comfortable retirement. He needs to lose this package pronto. He needs to end his days in a Federal prison, and given the damage he has done, it is a great pity that Donald Rumsfeld is too old to have to worry therein about homosexual rape. He personally monitored and personally authorized unconstitutional torture of suspects including Lindh, the American picked up in Afghanistan and he personally, with a bully's smirk doubtless on his face, gave troops license for what happened at Abu Ghraib.
This is a man who has never grown up. He plays boy's games and goes on whitewater rafting trips to prove a manhood he never once had. His gaze at Searle and at the Pentagon was, basilisk like, intended to suck not only the air from conference rooms but the very possibility of post-Enlightenment manhood.
If there's any chance of getting the sum wrong, he doesn't do numbers. If he might be seen as missing a detail he is concepty. He doesn't "do" foreign policy, and he snubs the Chinese military attache when that gentleman has valuable information on Afghanistan (and, probably, losing Osama thereby): he doesn't "do" diplomacy because it's hard work. This man is a child.
But, the American people enabled his conduct and should hang their co-alcoholic, co-dysfunctional heads in shame: for that's what Rumsfeld used. He was the uncle who rapes the daughter, and the daughter is the one who is condemned as shrill.
His conduct augurs nothing good for the USA, and possibly, its descent into civil war when economic decline and environmental destruction set in a few short years from now.
Late in life, Barry Goldwater said of his fellow Republicans: when I think of these men I get sick to my stomach and I want to throw up. When I think of Donald Rumsfeld I get sick to my stomach and I want to throw up.
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