leaving office in 2006. yet it s more apparent now than ever just how little he has learned from his mistakes along the way. with us now is the man behind the movie, the documentary filmmaker errol morris and political analyst david corn of mother jones. errol, thank you for joining us. i found this long documentary mystifying, yet it is the donald rumsfeld i have always known, fey, whimsical face that i swear has the look of a car bomber because he has a smile about the most serious, horrible things. 186,000 people died in the iraq war, and he gets sort of chummy about it, and he is sort of friendly to you. does he know what he is talking about morally? does he know the decisions he made and went along with that caused that war? no. i don t think he does. how do you get is that why dick cheney liked him. because he was such a tool that he didn t stop and say wait a minute, are we really going to war with a country, we re going to take it over, we re going to run that place, ki
i have yet to hear a crystal clear statement of why we went to war with iraq. i know some of the arguments, w want to outdo his father oar getting revenge for saddam hussein s attempt to kill his father. the geopolitical argument that taking down iraq would weaken the peace deal in the middle east, the argument that the road to jerusalem went through baghdad. i know dick cheney and lifetime practice of not taking his foot off the neck of any opponent who could get the chance. donald rumsfeld, please, don, tell us what it was all about. please, don, just spill the beans. i watched this long documentary on rumsfeld. he strikes me the way he always has, fay, whimsical, eccentric, i suppose. nothing about the real reasons for that war. nothing about nuclear weapons, the ones saddam never had. nothing about the threat to the united states because he never was a threat. nothing about why 186,000 people should die. what a moral disaster the whole
all generalizations are false including this one. he keeps trying to cloak these grand actions that had tremendous impacts on people s lives causing deaths in tens of thousands. there s no sense of human connection here. it s all about this rumsfeld corporate zen which when you start peeling it back, there s nothing behind it. the film confronts an issue that confused many in this country after 9/11, the fact saddam hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. that didn t stop the administration from blurring the lines in the lead-up to the war. take a look. osama gets away and a confusion sets in. people began to think that saddam was connected with al qaeda and with 9/11. oh, i don t think so. i don t think the american people were confused about that. in 2003, in a washington post poll, 69% said they
kinds of mayhem, and then we re going to own it because we don t like the fact they fired on some of our airplanes? what was his reason for the war? that s ostensibly what donald rumsfeld wanted to do in a new documentary out next month, but it s not what happened. rumsfeld is the subject of the unknown known by academy award winning director errol morris who spent 33 hours interviewing the former defense chief. the inherent irony of the film was how badly rumsfeld portray himself not as a man haunted by the demons of his past but unrepentant egoist whose account of history is whimsical. marred by smugness and evasion. rumsfeld shows no misgivings about his decision as secretary of defense. despite overwhelming evidence, he remains a contrarian on the defining failure of the bush administration.
doing it. it s one of the scariest interviews i have ever done. okay. compare him to robert mcnamara. mcnamara, thoughtful, reflective, agonized about the past. rumsfeld completely unapologetic, pleased with himself. convinced absolutely in his own correctness, his own rectitude. they couldn t be more different than two people could possibly be. thank you so much. the film s called the unknown known. it will drive you crazy, but you have to see it. thank you, errol morris and david corn for your expertise. the book is hubris. the best book ever on that war. we ll be right back after this. oh-oh, oh, oh, la, la-la, la-la, la-la na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na