Stock版 - Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully |
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W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 1 The Daily Beast
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-rumsfeld-killer-400-000-224008965.html
Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully
Spencer Ackerman
Wed, June 30, 2021, 5:40 PM
The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t
occur in an Iraqi prison. Yet that was foreordained, considering how
throughout his life inside the precincts of American national security,
Rumsfeld escaped the consequences of decisions he made that ensured a
violent, frightening end for hundreds of thousands of people.
An actuarial table of the deaths for which Donald Rumsfeld is responsible is
difficult to assemble. In part, that’s a consequence of his policy, as
defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, not to compile or release body counts,
a PR strategy learned after disclosing the tolls eroded support for the
Vietnam War. As a final obliteration, we cannot know, let alone name, all
the dead.
But in 2018, Brown University’s Costs of War Project put together something
that serves as the basis for an estimate. According to Neda C. Crawford,
Brown’s political-science department chair, the Afghanistan war to that
point claimed about 147,000 lives, to include 38,480 civilians; 58,596
Afghan soldiers and police (about as many American troops as died in Vietnam
); and 2,401 U.S. servicemembers.
Rumsfeld was hardly the only person in the Bush administration responsible
for the Afghanistan war. But in December 2001, under attack in Kandahar,
where it had retreated from the advance of U.S. and Northern Alliance forces
, the Taliban sought to broker a surrender—one acceptable to the U.S.-
installed Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld
refused. “I do not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation,
that's unacceptable to the United States,” he said. That statement reaped a
20-year war, making it fair to say that the subsequent deaths are on his
head, even while acknowledging that Rumsfeld was hardly the only architect
of the conflict.
Exclusive: Watch Donald Rumsfeld Lie About Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in ‘The
Unknown Known’
Crawford in 2018 also tallied between 267,792 and 295,170 deaths to that
point in Iraq. That is almost certainly a severe undercount, and it includes
between a very conservatively estimated 182,000 to 204,000 civilians; over
41,000 Iraqi soldiers and police; and 4,550 U.S. servicemembers. As one of
the driving forces behind the invasion and the driving force behind the
occupation, Rumsfeld is in an elite category of responsibility for these
deaths, alongside his protege Dick Cheney and the president they served,
George W. Bush.
Rumsfeld’s depredations short of the wars of choice he oversaw—and yes,
responding to 9/11 with war in Afghanistan was no less a choice than the
unprovoked war of aggression in Iraq – were no less severe. His
indifference to the suffering of others was hardly unique among American
policymakers after 9/11, but his blitheness about it underscored the cruel
essence of the enterprise. When passed a sheet of paper that, in
bureaucratic language, pitched a torture technique of forcing men held
captive at Guantanamo Bay for hours on end, Rumsfeld scribbled a shrug on it
banking on using the U.S. military to invade Iraq, a reporter asked about
using U.S. forces to provide security for rebuilding Afghanistan at a moment
before Taliban resistance coalesced. “Ah, peacekeeping,” he sneered in
return, explaining that such tasks were beneath U.S. forces.
But to those forces, for whom he was responsible, he was no less indifferent
. In Kuwait in December 2004, National Guardsmen preparing for deployment
confronted Rumsfeld in the hope of enlisting his help with a dire
circumstance. They were scrounging through scrap heaps for metal to weld
onto their insufficiently armored vehicles so the RPGs they were sure to
encounter wouldn’t kill them. Rumsfeld let it be known that the war
mattered, not the warfighter. “You go to war with the Army you’ve got, not
the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” he replied.
Wikileaks Shows Rumsfeld and Casey Lied about the Iraq War
If Rumsfeld was indignant at the question, it reflected the unreality he
inhabited and the lies he told as easily as he breathed. He wrapped himself
in a superficial understanding of epistemology (“there are known knowns;
there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns…”)
that a compliant press treated as sagacity. He wore a mask of assuredness,
a con man’s trick, as he said things that bore no resemblance to the truth,
such as his September 2002 insistence that he possessed “bulletproof”
evidence of a nonexistent alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. As
resistance in Iraq coalesced in summer 2003, Rumsfeld said it couldn’t be
“anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance,” even as a
reporter quoted U.S. military doctrine explaining why it was. He insisted,
“I don’t do quagmires” when quagmires were all he did.
He had reason to suspect he would get away with it. Manipulating the media
was, to Rumsfeld, a known known, since reporters loved Rumsfeld before they
hated him. U.S. News & World Report put a grinning Rumsfeld on the cover
above the headline “Rum Punch.” (“A Secretary of War Unlike Any Other…
You Got A Problem With That?”) Vanity Fair dispatched Annie Liebovitz to
photograph him amongst Bush’s war cabinet. People magazine called him the
“sexiest cabinet member” in 2002. A typical thumbsucker piece, this one in
the Los Angeles Times of August 17, 2003, began with the falsity that “
Donald H. Rumsfeld has won two wars and won them his way...” The
conservative press reflected the subtext. “The Stud” was what National
Review called the septuagenarian Rumsfeld as it depicted him in a come-
hither pose.
The scale of death Rumsfeld—and Bush, and Cheney, and so on—is responsible
for does not even make him the bloodiest American of his era. That would be
Henry Kissinger, whom the historian Greg Grandin estimates is responsible
for between three and four million dead. But American elites embrace
Kissinger – and more recently Bush – in a way they never would embrace the
post-Iraq Rumsfeld. Kissinger, after all, never raised sufficient ire
amongst general officers to make his continued tenure impossible, as
Rumsfeld experienced in the spring 2006 “Generals’ Revolt” that presaged
his November 2006 downfall.
But getting rid of Rumsfeld only compounded the tragedy of his works, rather
than alleviating them. For the generals who came for Rumsfeld did not come
for his wars. They came to save the wars from Rumsfeld, prolonging their
agony and futility with the convenient alibi that they could be won, if only
a change atop the Pentagon came. With U.S. troops still in Iraq and
President Biden adding caveat after caveat to his withdrawal, removing
Donald Rumsfeld from the wars only permitted them to continue to this day.
Rumsfeld never faced any accountability for what he did, only political
eclipse, and wrote an inevitable memoir about why he was right and what he
did was good.
The Afghan War Is Over—but Not for These Gitmo Prisoners
Starting around two years after Bush accepted Rumsfeld’s resignation, I
would walk up Connecticut Avenue, NW each morning to my newsroom near the so
-called Hinckley Hilton. Frequently, I would see a wizened figure walking
south from his Kalorama mansion down Connecticut as I headed north. He
carried a metal cane, but he didn’t lean on it: he held it in each hand,
parallel to the ground, as if he were walking a tightrope. His teeth would
be bared as he drew back his lips in the facsimile of a grin so familiar
from his post-9/11 press conferences. It was all weird, but I never
approached him, as he was accompanied by a bodyguard who would flash me the
keep-walking-pal expression.
For the potency and vigor Rumsfeld wanted to project, he moved delicately.
An elderly man, he walked starting with his hips, swaying one foot outward
before sweeping the other one forward, slow half-moons of motion as he
carefully descended the hill north of Dupont Circle. How frail was this man
who can lay claim to the deaths of at least 415,000 people, and how bitter
it is that unlike them, his name will be remembered, even in infamy. | W***n
发帖数: 11530 | | r*****e
发帖数: 7853 | 3 你今晚吃饱了吗？没有的话可以去领点儿吃的
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【在 W***n 的大作中提到】
: The Daily Beast
: https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-rumsfeld-killer-400-000-224008965.html
: Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully
: Spencer Ackerman
: Wed, June 30, 2021, 5:40 PM
: The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t
: occur in an Iraqi prison. Yet that was foreordained, considering how
: throughout his life inside the precincts of American national security,
: Rumsfeld escaped the consequences of decisions he made that ensured a
: violent, frightening end for hundreds of thousands of people.
| W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 4
U, a typical 独运轮f猪头垃圾
【在 r*****e 的大作中提到】
: 你今晚吃饱了吗？没有的话可以去领点儿吃的
:
: t
: is
: ,
: something
: Vietnam
: forces
: a
: The
| W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 5
你哪天就会被你主子警察打死
http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Stock/38569443.html
LOL
【在 r*****e 的大作中提到】
: 你今晚吃饱了吗？没有的话可以去领点儿吃的
:
: t
: is
: ,
: something
: Vietnam
: forces
: a
: The
| r*****e
发帖数: 7853 | 6 人家杀的是穆斯林，你毛爹杀了多少战友，多少同胞
【在 W***n 的大作中提到】
:
: 你哪天就会被你主子警察打死
: http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Stock/38569443.html
: LOL
| r*****e
发帖数: 7853 | 7 你饭都吃不饱，操这个闲心
【在 W***n 的大作中提到】
:
: 你哪天就会被你主子警察打死
: http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Stock/38569443.html
: LOL
| W***n
发帖数: 11530 | 8
U 独运轮f猪头垃圾, good nite
LOL
【在 r*****e 的大作中提到】
: 人家杀的是穆斯林，你毛爹杀了多少战友，多少同胞
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