Career neocon and warmongering monster Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88, the news media has reported. Rumsfeld was kind of the Fauci of the early 2000’s, a relatively faceless bureaucrat who circumstance selected to serve in a glamorous role as a symbol of the zeitgeist of his time. Rumsfeld became the rock star of George W. Bush’s 2002 Iraq war.
He warmed to the camera, after spending many years in relative obscurity in the revolving-door world between highly-paid positions in the “private sector” and battery-recharges back in senior government positions.
To keep your value to the weapons manufacturers you must constantly re-steep yourself into the world of the bureaucracy and also the world of the Congressional-military-industrial complex. You have to dip your beak into the endless river of military appropriations and the (deep state) people who grease the skids of billions of dollars to the war industry.
Otherwise you do not know what buttons to push to deliver billion dollar contracts in exchange for million dollar salaries.
In this endeavor, Rumsfeld was not the worst offender, it must be said. He was, unlike our current Defense Secretary, never on the board of missile-maker and death-dealer Raytheon. In fact his credentials in the war industry were paltry compared to the new breed of “public servant” in Pentagon leadership.
Nevertheless, Rumsfeld took on the job of selling the monstrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq as “the good war” and he made sure he was the face of the marketing campaign.
The one thing the US mainstream media agrees on is the promotion of the US global military empire, and thus Rumsfeld’s follies in front of the camera were for the most part presented to Red and Blue America as wholesome evening entertainment.
Known unknowns and unknown knowns and etc. It was all gobblygook but Rumsfeld delivered it with a smile and bravado and it sure beat having to watch video clips of innocent children slaughtered by America’s “shock and awe” bombing orgy against a country that did not threaten us and could not have threatened us if it wanted to do so.
Yes, much more enjoyable to watch the Rumsfeld follies than to watch Iraqi children burning to death and fatally radiated under the terrorism of US bombs.
So, many antiwar allies are tonight dancing on the perhaps sulfuric-smelling grave of Donald Rumsfeld, but I will not be joining them.
Rumsfeld was all-powerful for a brief time, when the machine had selected him for the role. He was the face of the “good war” against the “demon of the day,” Saddam Hussein. And there is no doubt that he relished his emergence from the bowels of the war apparatus to the poetry of the Pentagon daily briefing.
But in the end, Rumsfeld was just another tool of the bigger beast. In that way his death is pathetic. Just another traveling salesman of a product that had already been bought and sold many times over: Death.
God have mercy on Donald Rumsfeld’s soul. Let’s pray he converted to actual Christianity and thus saved himself from eternal horror. To hope for less is to descend to the level of the neocon demons themselves.
At the end of the day, yes Rumsfeld helped sell a war that killed a million people and did not in any measurable way make us more safe. But he’s a mere piker in our current far more murky world of deep state murderers like Austin, Nuland, Powers, Blinken, and so many others who will never appear before the camera because they are too busy manning the killing machine.
Rumsfeld was a monster 20 years ago. Today compared to his competition for neocon monster murderer he is a mere footnote in the book of US foreign policy murder history.
Rest in Peace Donald Rumsfeld. May God have mercy on your soul (and on all of our equally sinful souls). Amen.
