I can’t believe this trained ape still has the gall to open his pie-hole about U.S. foreign policy, or anything, really.
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday attacked the Obama administration for failing to secure a status of forces agreement with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.
Rumsfeld, speaking on Fox News, said even a “trained ape” could do better.“A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement,” Rumsfeld said. “It does not take a genius. And we have so mismanaged that relationship.”
Rumsfeld noted that the United States has such agreements with more than 100 other countries. Such an agreement would allow the United States to station military forces in Afghanistan for years to come.
Hamid Karzai is refusing to sign a SOFA with the United States, but every candidate to replace Karzai is on the record as supporting some kind of ongoing agreement to keep some troops in Afghanistan. Anyone who has paid any attention to President Karzai over recent years has noticed that he’s increasingly erratic and unhinged. If he doesn’t want to make an agreement, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other because his successor almost certainly will.
Even more amazing than Rumsfeld’s misfired criticism over a status of forces agreement is his defense of Karzai’s defense of Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
Karzai recently voiced support for Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine — a significant blow to U.S.-Afghan relations. Rumsfeld said he understands Karzai’s increasingly antagonistic relationship, given the Obama administration’s treatment of him.
“United States diplomacy has been so bad — so embarrassingly bad — that I’m not the least bit surprised that he felt cornered and is feeling he has to defend himself in some way or he’s not president of that country,” Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said the Bush administration had a “first-rate” relationship with Karzai and that it has gone “downhill like a toboggan” since Obama took over.
It’s hard to decide which part of that is the most stunning. Is it his willingness to give Karzai a complete pass for siding with Putin or is it his bizarre belief that the Bush administration had a first-rate relationship with Karzai or is it his seeming belief that a first-rate relationship with the corrupt and incompetent Karzai would be a positive thing even if it had ever actually existed?
In the end, even President Bush thought Rumsfeld was a worthless sack of crap. He should be in prison, not on teevee mouthing off about crap he never did and still doesn’t understand.
“Trained ape” has a clear dog whistle tone as well.
Less of a dog whistle, more of a bullhorn.
There was that open forum, possibly press conference, in which Rumsfeld was fielding questions from European journalists and ministers somewhere in Germany. trying to drum up support for the iraq invasion. I think it was early 2003, and the German foreign minister at the time, I forget his name, had to endure Rumsfeld’s personalized message to the Germans. It went something like, “My ancestors, the Rumsfelds come from good German stock in Northern Germany in the Holstein area. I understand the strong sense of independence of the German people because I’m one of you.”
The German Foreign Minister was exasperated, as he stumbled through his list of reasons why Germany would not participate in an Iraq invasion. His response was more or less, “Your German ancestry aside, you simply have not made an adequate case for going to war.” A fine assessment indeed. I wonder what pinheads in the Bush Administration simply did not take seriously the post World War Two German phrase, “nie wieder Krieg, or “war, never again.”
○ ‘Old Europe’ hits back at Rumsfeld
○ FM Joschka Fischer and the Ukranian visa affair
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I have to quote John Oliver: “You know we can hear you, right?”
Amazing that Rumsfeld actually said that out loud. That’s not a dog whistle, that’s an air raid siren.
“He should be
in prisondragged naked, beaten, and screaming through the streets of DC; publicly disemboweled while alive; and his remains displayed for a month before being dumped in a landfill, not on teevee mouthing off about crap he never did and still doesn’t understand.”Fixed that for you.
So if what Obama is doing is embarrassingly bad (and I’m certainly not saying it’s been great), then what does Rumsfeld consider to be “good”? half a million US troops occupying the whole country? ‘Cause that’s what it would take to bring it back to soviet-era stability – and we’d bankrupt ourselves in the process.
Really, these guys live in a life size board game. Reality just doesn’t occur to them.
The argument presupposes that we should have a perpetual base in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, I am hearing from the American people, black and white, Liberal and Conservative, that we should get the Hell out of Afghanistan as fast as possible and never go back, except possibly (Conservative’s idea) to bomb them into oblivion. They are all sick and tired of having our young people blown up and gunned down by our so-called ally.
I was going to comment on exactly that, Voice.
This line: “Such an agreement would allow the United States to station military forces in Afghanistan for years to come.”
I think von Rumsfeld is confused about what is desirable or rational policy for the United States.
“I think von Rumsfeld is confused about what is desirable or rational policy for the United States. ”
He’s been that way for fifty years.
But wait, isn’t he in his seventies? Think you may be selling him short!
Checked wikipedia. He’s 82. As I recalled, he was my boss’ Congressman in 1967. A warhawk even then.
Well, we had the chance to kneecap these assholes and they were let off the hook. I suppose it would be a violation of decorum or something for the President to crush this fool. One can hope.
Huh, that’s odd. I remember when criticizing the Commander in Chief was treason. That must have changed at some point.
Karzai has a history in oil and, I understand, the CIA. Those two fields dovetail quite nicely, as history has shown us. He was put into power by a Bush, so it’s conceivable, likely, that he’s got more loyalty to Bush-CIA-Big Oil than to Obama or even Afghanistan.
I suspect he’s got his money tucked away in secure bank accounts and his family have chosen their villas. The Bush-CIA-Big Oil group offer him a comfortable future and all he has to do is mouth off at Obama occasionally.
Meanwhile, what does Obama offer him?
Beyond his monthly two suitcases full of cash?
Um, it seems von Rumsfeld has forgotten that Bushco itself accepted a SOFA in Iraq that was voidable by the Parliament and required a complete pull out of US forces by date certain. The Iraqis (like the Afghans today) simply wouldn’t agree to perpetual occupation. Of course, the inconceivably incompetent von Rumsfeld had long since been fired.
Add in the fact that, with a competent Sec of Defense, the Afghan war could very likely have had a much better outcome had US military assets in Afghanistan not been massively transferred in early 2002 to participate in the illegal Iraq invasion, thus starving the Afghan theater and resulting in our defeat in Afghanistan.
But of course, neo-con fools and incompetents like von Rumsfeld and Kristol, the architects of American defeat and foreign policy calamity, are still highly regarded “experts” by the useless corporate media…failure is success, defeat is victory.
Always good to remember that the father of Aspartame, which lists as its psychological effects memory loss & impaired judgment demonstrates so perfectly why we not only shouldn’t ingest his words, but should leave the ingestion of his products to the history books.
Karzai today is a walking FDA warning not to use Rummy’s secret stash of Aspartame he left behind.
There are candidates in the Afghan election who have not promised a status of forces agreement. Not having a status of forces agreement gives Karzai the authority to ask the US to leave his country.
Continuing troops in Afghanistan is not a victory for US foreign policy. Continuing covert involvement in Afghanistan is not a victory for US foreign policy.
I’m operating on the assumption that there are a few folks in the White House who know that the key to stability in Afghanistan is to get the US uninvolved as quickly as possible so the political factions in Afghanistan can sort it out. The US contributes nothing but extra confusion at this point.
What looks like a failure from the point of view of Rumsfeld and obstinacy from some Americans’ view of Karzai might be in fact the way that we bring US troops home. The candidate most likely to allow backdoor US involvement is Abdullah Abdullah. Some of the others are providing lip service in English; one wonders what their actual pitches to voters are.
Finally, Rumsfeld’s choice of wording allows one to ask at what point elderly conservatives have to clear up rumors of senile dementia before speaking. Reagan was apparently more incapacitated in the last year or so than most folks knew. Rumsfeld’s behavior as Secretary of Defense was abnormally odd for on in that position–and the US has had some doozies.
Well, I am gobsmacked that nobody in this thread, nor booman in the original post, highlighted that other time Rummy went on about a “trained ape”:
And what the heck, since I dug up the doc where I saved that one, and we just had the 11th anniversary of the War Crime of invading Iraq under the “justification” of the pack of lies* that gem (my very favorite) was part of . . . may as well reprise the whole list of Greatest Hits:
*to pre-empt the anticipated defense that these weren’t (necessarily) literal “lies” because they may have sincerely believed them to be true: sorry, just doesn’t work. Note that none of them were expressed to reflect a level of confidence consistent with what it was even conceivably possible to “know”. No ‘after thorough and careful assessment, our strong conclusion from the preponderance of the best available evidence is that [. . .]’ or similar. Instead, again and again and again: “we know”, “no doubt”, “absolutely sure”, etc., etc., etc. The indisputable lies were these expressions of absolute certitude where no such certainty was ever even remotely possible (in fact, quite ironically enough, they all fit quite neatly into Rummy’s own epistemological category of “known unknowns”) . . . never mind that we now know the substance of these claims was all entirely false. That they believed (if they believed — I’m skeptical of that, too) the content within the lies is neither here nor there.
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Foreign policy is still a matter of smoke and mirrors – and Rumsfeld knows what information to keep secret and how to project the propaganda.
Despite the clear knowledge that war crimes were committed which will never be punished ( http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/05/12/bush-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-absentia/ ) and the rundown on the lies cooked up in Cheney’s office by Addison et al ( or Scooter Libby’s fallguy routine for ‘blowing’ a CIA analyst/agent who was responsible for the Brewster Jennings covert operation monitoring nuclear threat – disabling realistic appraisal ) http://www.leadingtowar.com/ followed by which was Rumsfeld’s caching of the 1999 war game “Post-Saddam Iraq : Desert Crossing”…but it was still referred to as “The Bible for Iraq” The classified implementation of Bremer’s Orders opening Iraq up for exploitation are touched on in The Panelist’s http://www.thepanelist.net/opinions-culture-10084/1252-the-real-victor-in-iraq-monsanto
Who was the big deal in Monsanto ? Rumsfeld. Who continues to have a controlling interest in Washington’s agricultural policies ? Though you’d never ask.
GM foods most likely make people sterile. There is one trucker who used to raise cattle before feeding them GM corn….and the herd then could not carry young to term.
The ‘trained ape’ has poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium the way Clinton poisoned the Balkans. So much for ‘Inconvenient People’ with rights to their mineral resources.