Good riddance, Mr. Rumsfeld!

Editor's note: Leon D'Souza, a graduate of the JCOM department, now serves America in uniform. He is a frequent guest contributor to the Hard News Cafe.

By Leon D'Souza

November 15, 2006 | Donald Rumsfeld remained obstinate to the end.

Even in the throes of a decisive coup de grace, President Bush's embattled secretary of defense -- the very avatar of bluff and bluster -- chose to leave Americans with a bit of his legendary arrogance.

Addressing his remarks to the country's chief executive at a White House news conference on Nov. 8, the Pentagon's top gun spoke with prophetic conviction about what he characterized as a "little-understood, unfamiliar war," too "complex for people to comprehend."

"I know with certainty," the impervious bureaucrat told the president, "that, over time, the contributions you've made will be recorded by history."

There was no modesty in his demeanor and no remorse in his tone. Contrary to popular opinion, Mr. Rumsfeld's parting message was unambiguously hubristic: History, he seemed to predict, would vindicate the Bush administration's actions in Iraq, and by association, exonerate his own hard-headed handling of the war.

But history is a double-edged sword that also has a way of slicing through deceit with embarrassing clarity. And Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his colleagues in the Bush Cabinet, will certainly have quite a bit of explaining to do before they can lay claim to prescience.

For the most part, the soon-to-be former secretary will be compelled to defend his relentless doublespeak on the rationale for war.

In 2003, for example, as the first bombs pounded Baghdad, Mr. Rumsfeld told the Washington press corps he had every reason to believe Saddam Hussein's government possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

"We know where they are," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

The revelation was delivered with a sense of certitude, the kind of confidence that once led scores of Americans -- 70 percent, according to one poll -- to believe the Iraqi leader was somehow personally responsible for the epidemic of terror unleashed by the events of 9-11.

A belief held with good reason.

Earlier that year, Mr. Rumsfeld had publicized a painstakingly specific catalog of Hussein's lethal agents, an arsenal thought to include "VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas; anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox." All this in addition to "an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons."

If Mr. Rumsfeld was right, we should have been able to swoop in and unearth hundreds of secret labs, brimming over with deadly compounds. Yet scarcely two months into the war, an elusive search for these weapons saw the canny secretary singing a different tune.

"We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country," he told Fox News Sunday. "We're going to find what we find as a result of talking to people, I believe, not simply by going to some site and hoping to discover it."

Well, Mr. Secretary, you sure had us fooled.

Of course, finding these weapons wouldn't necessarily have helped Mr. Rumsfeld's waning public image.

History made sure of that in late 2002, when declassified papers obtained by The Washington Post conclusively linked the White House hawk to Iraq's WMD buildup during its eight-year war with Iran.

As then-President Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, Mr. Rumsfeld laid the groundwork for "the export of biological agents, including anthrax; vital ingredients for chemical weapons; and cluster bombs sold by a CIA front organization in Chile."

Now an ardent critic of Hussein's barbarity, Mr. Rumsfeld is reported to have met with the Iraqi leader in 1983 to assure him of America's full support in his jihad against Shiite militancy. In his defense, the secretary has repeatedly claimed to have "cautioned" Hussein against the use of banned weapons, however these alleged admonitions are absent from the State Department's record of that meeting.

What's more, Mr. Rumsfeld is quoted as having assured Iraq that America's condemnation of its use of chemical weapons was issued "strictly" as a matter of principle. That is to say, the censure in no way altered Washington's position on the Iran-Iraq war, and its desire to improve bilateral relations "at a pace of Iraq's choosing."

This from a man who, in August, accused Bush administration critics of "moral or intellectual confusion," comparing them with those who advocated appeasing Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Mr. Rumsfeld, it would seem, is a politician of shifting values and volatile affections; a latter-day Machiavelli, who carried out a politics of artful deviousness while an unsuspecting nation sent its innocents to war -- a confrontation that, in his mind, was supposed to be swift.

"The idea that it's going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990," Mr. Rumsfeld said on an Infinity Radio call-in program four months before hostilities began. "Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that.

"It won't be a World War III."

Historians will be obligated to recall those words as they begin a meticulous accounting of the thousands of lives -- American and Iraqi -- lost on account of them. Just as they will be obliged to point out, for the sake of narrative detail, that the secretary once admitted to using a machine to replicate his signature on condolence letters to the families of dead soldiers.

It is when these accounts are written that the calculated heartlessness of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon will be most readily apparent.

History, in the end, has never been kind to tyrants.

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