Yes, that’s right, ladies, gents, and enbies of all ages. Donald Fucking Rumsfeld has finally commenced his Big Sleep in the Forever Box. And how better to commemorate the occasion than Mike Malloy’s fantasmagorical shredding of the old warmonger and his general whackjobbery?
Hard to believe that all happened nearly 20 years ago.
And speaking of memorable fantasmagoria and general whackjobbery, who can forget Rummy’s foray into poetry?
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Downright philosophical, that is. That’s what Mike was alluding to in the audio clip above. I guess Rummy’s about to find out a few unknown unknowns now, including what it’s like to go down as one of the most reviled figures of modern history:
Iyad el-Baghdadi, president of the Kawaakibi Foundation, a research and activist group focused on liberty in the Arab world, said “Donald Rumsfeld was a war criminal who presided over illegal wars that involved wholesale massacres of civilians, systemic torture and plunder, and massive corruption”.
“The country he helped break has still not recovered. This is his legacy. May he burn in hell for all eternity.”
Rumsfeld oversaw the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but failed to maintain law and order in the aftermath, and Iraq descended into chaos with a bloody rebellion and violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims. US troops remained in Iraq until 2011, long after he left his post.
[…]
Rumsfeld played a leading role before the war in Iraq, in making the case to the world for the March 2003 invasion. He warned of the dangers of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but no such weapons were ever discovered.
Critics faulted Rumsfeld for dismissing the pre-invasion assessment of the US Army’s top general, Eric Shinseki, that several hundred thousand allied troops would be needed to stabilise Iraq.
Rumsfeld also was accused of being slow to recognise the emergence of the rebellion in 2003 and the threat it posed.
In a 2011 interview with Al Jazeera, Rumsfeld was asked about whether the initial size of the Iraq invasion force and the Bush administration policies regarding the war were “responsible for the killing of innocent Iraqis”.
“You keep making assertions which are fundamentally false,” a combative Rumsfeld responded. “No one in the Pentagon said they (number of troops) were not enough.”
So you can see why I’m not exactly sad to hear that he’s finally gone.
I bet Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t, either.
