I recently commented that it was odd that Donald Rumsfeld hadn’t been heard from for several weeks. Well, yesterday he emerged from his bunker and withstood quite a grilling from Bill “The Bookie of Virtue” Bennett. A fascinating interview, really. For instance, did you know that Mrs. Rumsfeld has a great recipe for Welsh rarebit and she’s really terrific? Or that the Bennett’s got a new puppy and Bill wanted to name it “Rummy”? The interview included a total of eleven “(laughs)” and “(chuckles)” and three “shames” when they finally managed to get around to talking about Iraq.
And yes, all that sectarian violence is a shame but as Mr. Bennett astutely pointed out and Rumsfeld agreed, it doesn’t mean democracy isn’t flowering in Iraq:
BENNETT: Sure. But it’s interesting the litany, as you put it — because you can have a democratic state and have a lot of violence. Look at Israel.
SECRETARY RUMSFELD: You bet.
As I said, a fascinating interview…
After Rumsfeld gave Bennett a quick recap of the various militias in Iraq (apparently there are only three, one of them who “are not doing violence to anyone”), Rumsfeld outlined the “basic message” of the current conditions:
…there are a lot of Muslims killing innocent men, women and children who are Muslims, and that is a shame for that country…And it doesn’t take a genius to kill innocent men, women and children. You can just take a bomb and blow it up in a restaurant or something. And that’s what’s happening, and it’s a shame for the people in that country.
Rumsfeld talked about Shi’a on Sunni violence, calling them criminals but strangely enough, never said anything about al Qaeda, insurgents, terrorists or even Islamofacists. Does this mean the violence we’re seeing is a civil war?
— the people who look at it contend that they’re not in it, and the government of Iraq says they’re not in a civil war — although this level of sectarian violence is the kind of thing that people cite when they contend that it is.
I suppose that means contenders are wrong and deciders are right. And what about troop levels?
The tension between them is that to the extent you have too many, you have the risk of creating a dependency on the part of the Iraqi government so they’ll let you do the work instead of they do the work.
Second, you run the risk of creating the impression that you’re there to stay forever, looking for their oil, creating an occupation force that’s permanent, and you don’t want that.
If you have too few, you run the risk that the level of violence is so high that the political progress can’t go forward in an orderly way. And that is an art, not a science.
In more than 3 years, there has been a generally constant level of U.S. troops regardless of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops that we’ve allegedly trained. Yes, we wouldn’t want to create an impression of dependency. And God knows we don’t want to look like we’re only interested in their oil, although Iraqis may still wonder why after the fall of Baghdad, our troops rushed to guard the Oil Ministry while hospitals were being looted. And given that the government operates strictly within the Green Zone and thousands of Iraqi civilians are dying every month, I would hate to think what Rumsfeld would consider an unacceptable level of violence.
And of course, Rumsfeld cited all of the progress. Jordan assigned an ambassador (can you spell l-i-f-e i-n-s-u-r-a-n-c-e?), the currency is stable and schools and hospitals are open. Well, I do know that the hospitals are open since they have to have somewhere to take the dead and wounded every day, so yes, let’s call that progress. And in other good news:
I think that the government now is starting to get its legs under it and able to make decisions that ought to tell the people of that country that there is a better way than killing each other.
Simple(minded), isn’t it?
And after a few more laughs, Rumsfeld had to go back to work…Bennett’s final word?
Terrific.
I’d describe the interview as shameful.
