"As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, December 8, 2004, answering soldiers' complaints over armoring in ongoing Iraqi combat.“Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant…lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, ‘Look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States.’”
George W. Bush, President of the United States, February 28, 2008, criticizing Barack Obama."Is it not funny that those with 160,000 forces in Iraq accuse us of interference?"
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, March 2, 2008, upon arrival in Iraq.
Irony abounds. Rumsfeld is long gone, of course, but his legacy remains. He who shook hands with enemy-of-my-enemy Saddam Hussein as a Reagan envoy in 1983 came to see the same dictator as a pillar of his new boss's "Axis of Evil" two decades later. Five years ago, when the US was on the verge of invading Iraq, Rumsfeld and his sidekick Paul Wolfowitz berated (and eventually "retired") their chief military skeptic, General Eric Shinseki, when he dared suggest that neocon plans to occupy Iraq with token forces were doomed to failure. Those soldiers who complained to the then Defense Secretary were among the victims of Rumsfeld's headstrong insistence on doing things his way.
Ken Silverstein of Harper's, in a wonderful little post entitled "President Bush, Without Irony, 'Assails Democratic Candidates' Foreign Policy Views,'" takes the above Washington Post quote and annotates it with appropriate links. Links to photos of President Bush shaking hands with several world class tyrants, all of whom sit on pools of oil, and none of whom fear regime change from anyone other than their own oppressed peoples. Presumably it's patriotic when Bush sups with "our" dictators, but suspect when Democrats propose to talk with recalcitrant dictators.
It's a good day in Baghdad, especially if you're name is Ahmadinejad. What his "Axis of Evil" predecessors could not accomplish in a decade of war - victory over Sunni Iraq and its secular, Baath socialist strongman - was handed to him by that scourge of tyrants, George W. Bush, in March 2003. Now it's not only surge-safe for Shiites of all nationalities in Baghdad - they rule the roost. Iran - Iraq's most important neighbor - has a full fledged embassy in Baghdad, while no Arab country yet has - surely a sign that the Arab world has not given its vote of confidence in the current Iraqi government's longevity.
Irony, impunity - little sense of the former, plenty of the latter. That is what we've had our fill of in the last eight years. I leave you with a final quote, which should become the mantra of the Democratic campaign for the US presidency:
"I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place."
Senator Barack Obama, January 31, 2008