Rumsfeld’s Distorting Mirror on Iraq

There is chutzpah.

And then there is chutzpah.

In the latter category, I give you Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Defense Secretary, and unreconstructed neocon.

You’d have thought, after the disaster he brought us in Iraq, that he’d have the good sense to lay low on this, the tenth anniversary of that debacle.

But no, the Donald took to Twitter, saying this:

“10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

Let’s take a second to marvel at that note of self-congratulation and the demand that we bow before him, a demand that I refuse to obey and I hope you refuse, too.

Because he certainly didn’t liberate the up to one million Iraqis he killed, or the more than two million he turned into refugees.

And he didn’t liberate the ones who were tortured by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib.

And even today, two years after Obama ended our part in the Iraq War, the bombs still go off in Baghdad, as the country remains hopelessly divided.

Donald Rumsfeld, who committed a war crime by launching this war and by overseeing the torture of detainees, has the most distorting mirror ever constructed.

Maybe that’s how he sleeps at night.

Otherwise, it’s a mystery to me.

If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story "A New Pope and a New Scandal." [2]

[3] Follow Matthew Rothschild @mattrothschild [3] on Twitter