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by fineIllregister 833 days ago
Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for the deaths of one million innocent Iraqi civilians at the cost of 3 trillion American dollars for nothing except the enrichment of a few. I agree that every person is complicated, but any possible nuance here is completely overwhelmed by the amount of destruction. Donald Rumsfeld is absolutely evil.

You might think you are smart for hedging, but if you think killing one million innocent lives just makes a person "complicated", you've lost the plot.

3 comments

On what basis are you holding Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the invasion?

If it's all on him, then wouldn't that absolve a lot of other powerful people around him, who were also pushing for it, and at least one of whom was his superior in the chain of command?

Nothing about that has anything to do with whether something he said was insightful or not. It’s possible for evil people to say smart things and for good people to say bullshit things.
It wasn't insightful (and nowhere did I say that Dondald Rumsfeld was incapable of saying something insightful). We knew then what he was trying to claim we didn't know. Even Dick Cheney said on the record (during the first Iraq War) that a full invasion would be a Vietnam style quagmire.

Rumsfeld said a smart-sounding thing he got from somewhere else, but it was just a lie. He knew the WMD claim was made up because he helped manufacture it. Iraq's non-involvement in 9/11 and our inability to accomplish regime change were "known knowns" prior to the invasion.

I have to wager that the Iraqi people probably prefer the current order of things. I would guess that they would keep things the way they are rather than bring back Saddam.
Pay up.

> "[T]wo-thirds of Iraqis as a whole believe that what happened in 2003 was bad for them."

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-iraq...

too bad we can't ask those million that are no longer living because of the decisions made during the Bush Admin