Donald Rumsfeld died last week — and it’s just so
easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum,
de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the
Atlantic and the
Daily Beast, have been downright vicious.
Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender. He’s been portrayed as a smug and pushy sumbitch who ran roughshod over sensible objections to war. The Bush administration’s torture program is said to be on his conscience.