Rumsfeld to servicepeople and their families: Stop whining, you wimps!

My favorite of all the Bush administration officials, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, gave a speech to the National Press Club on Friday (09/10/04).  Rummy, as his admirers call him, is what every antisocial 45-year-old corporate drone wants to grow up to be like in their 70s.

My man Rummy asked his audience to think back to the day before 9/11/01:

Consider the world of September 10th and before.  Two Americans and six others stood on trial by the Taliban in Afghanistan for the crime of preaching their religion.  The leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Massoud, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein -- by Osama bin Laden, Taliban's co- conspirator.  An Iraqi newspaper put out by Saddam Hussein's son Uday called on European corporations to pressure their governments to break  with the United States and Britain, so that the sanctions would be lifted.

Yep, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, whoever - one of those evil foreigners - was killing his opponents and Osama's son - Saddam's son, what's the difference? - was publishing newspapers.

Moving on to today, Rummy's decided maybe it wasn't such a good thing to have American soldiers torture prisoners:

I mentioned the schools in Russia and the hundreds of children. But the chopping off of heads on television, on video, so people can see it; taking pliers and pulling tongues out, and cutting them off; chopping off hands; attacking indiscriminately, or maybe I should say discriminately, the most innocent and the most vulnerable for the purpose of terrorizing -- terrorizing to alter behavior on the rest of the people in this world.

Oh, no, I misread that.  He meant it's only bad when the Evil Foreigners torture prisoners.  That sounds more like the Rummy we all know and admire.

Rummy says people who worry about soldiers being killed in an unnecessary war based on lies about WMDs are wimps:

Free people battled their kind before in struggles against dictators, fascists, communists of the last century.  Freedom has always required sacrifice.  And, regrettably, it has always cost lives. The attack on Pearl Harbor alone claimedthe lives of some 2,400 Americans on one day.   Roughly 400,000 more American troops would be killed before they overcame repeated defeats in those early years of World War II and demoralizing setbacks to eventually achieve victory years later.

I mention this because we've now lost over 1,100 Americans in the global war on terror -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan, elsewhere on the globe.  The reality is that as advanced as our capabilities are, the truth is that war is ugly and it takes lives.

 

It's important to keep in mind that the civilized world passed the 1,000th casualty mark at the hands of extremists long ago; I mean, 3,000 on September 11th alone; in a series of attacks that included the bombing of our embassies and military barracks.  It was the murder of so many and the destruction of so much in one morning on our soil three years ago that brought home what we're up against in this ongoing struggle.

Rummy says Spainards are wimps, too:

Some countries have elections taking place and there's a big tug of war over whether or not they should stay or whether they should have been there.  And the terrorists know that.  They're not stupid; they're smart.  And they've got brains, and they think, and they watch, and they saw what Spain did.  And they thought, my goodness, if we can affect that, maybe we can do something.  So they're going to be going after coalition countries; they're going to be looking for weak spots; they're going to be going after people who are running for office.  There are going to be Iraqi people who are engaged in that process, and they're going to do their best to try to stop it. (my emphasis)

In response to one question, Rummy was ready to send somebody to Guantanamo:

DONNELLY:  The Financial Times today editorializes that it is, quote, "time to consider Iraq withdrawal," close quote, noting the protracted war is not winnable and it's creating more terrorists than enemies of the West.  What is your response, this questioner asks.

RUMSFELD:  Who put that question in? He ought to get a life.  If he's got time to read that kind of stuff -- (laughter) -- he ought to get a life.  (Scattered applause.)

They've been saying things like that for months, and there have always been critics.  There have always been people who say it's not worth it.  And indeed, if you watch in any conflict in our history, there have always been people who said, "Why?  Why should we do that? Another loss of life.  Another person wounded.  Another limb off."   And -- you can't go to the hospitals at Bethesda or Walter Reed and see those folks and not have your heart break for them and the fact that their lives are going to be lived differently; or tomorrow, when we go to Arlington and recall all those who died on September 11th and lives not lived.

But it is worth it.  It is worth it.  And those who suggest to the contrary are not only wrong, but they will be proved wrong.

So, if you've lost a loved one or a friend or acquaintance in the Iraq War to get the WMDs that Rummy knew exactly where they were but they actually turned out not to exist, and you ask whether it's worth it to have more soldiers die in the same conflict, the Secretary of Defense has an answer for you:  Get a life, wimp!!  I'm sick of hearing all you wusses whining about, oh, somebody died, somebody got wounded, somebody lost a couple of limbs.  Boo, hoo, hoo.  Suck it up and cheer for the war, you gutless whiners!!!

Rummy responded with his usual restraint and delicacy to this question, as well:

DONNELLY:  Has the cost of the Iraq war, not just in terms of dollars and lives, but also the extended deployments and resulting impact on civilian careers of guardsmen and reservists, and the hardships on military families, exceeded what the administration had expected and told the nation to expect?

RUMSFELD:  Every person serving in the Guard and Reserve and the active force is a volunteer.  There's no one who was conscripted.  There's no one who was forced to do anything.  [Translation: I don't care what some whiny wimps think!] ...

The statement about the -- what the administration told the American people, it needs to be answered, it seems to me, because it seemed to have a little barb in it.  (Laughter.)  I can't climb into the questioner's mind, but I sense that.

You know, when September 11th came and 3,000 Americans were killed, we went to war.  There were people who thought that terrorism was a law enforcement problem, and what you do is you sit around with your finger in your ear and you wait till you get hit, and then like when somebody steals a car you run out and find the person, throw them in the jug and punish them for it.  Well, this is not about that. This is about something entirely different, terrorism is.  And it isn't a matter of throwing someone in the jug for stealing a car and punishing them; the task here is so fundamentally not law enforcement. It is trying to get the information so that we can go and find and stop the terrorist networks from killing another 3,000 people.  That's what this is about.  And I understand it's hard for some people to get their heads turned around on that. [Translation: If you criticize our wars or any of our policies, you're an Al Qaeda sympathizer! Plus you're a whiny wimp!!]

So what does the -- any administration tell the American people? Well, the prior administration said we'd be out of Bosnia by Christmas.  We're still there.  I have not said when we'll be out of Iraq -- (chuckles) -- because I don't know, and I know I don't know. What we have said is there's been criticism of the cost, there's been criticism of the length of time, and it's not knowable precisely. ...

Saddam Hussein (sic), if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught.  And we've not seen him on a video since 2001.  Now he's got to be busy.  Why is he busy?  It's because of the pressure that's being put on him. [Saddam, Osama, what's the difference?  Only wusses worry about such things!] ...

People are going to have to be steadfast.  They're going to have to reject the kind of counsel that The Financial Times gave this morning.  I didn't read this, so I assume you're reasonably right in your quotation, whoever asked the question.  We're going to have to say to people, "Don't be faint-hearted.  Don't think you can make a separate peace.  Don't think you can make a private deal, as a person or a country."  You can't.  We're in it together.  (Applause.) [Translation: I'm sick of this.  Somebody dies, somebody gits wounded, somebody loses an arm or a leg, so what?  Suck it up and stop your moaning and groaning, you pathetic whiners!]

That's Rummy's just a prince of a guy, isn't he?

When asked about his authorization of criminal, sadistic tortures against prisoners in the gulag, Rummy does a little song-and-dance about how he didn't do anything wrong and besides, it wasn't torture anyway.  Then he proceeds to explain why torture is okay because 9/11, The Terrorists, evil foreigners, etc.:

The -- I think there's two things to keep in mind.  One is that the people who were captured in Afghanistan had been in al Qaeda training camps.  Al Qaeda had just killed 3,000 Americans. Understandably, the task was not to put them in jail and have trials of them and then send them to jail because they were bad; it was to find out what in the world did they know.   Who were they going to hit next?  Where was bin Laden?  Where were the other senior al Qaeda people?  And that's why the president made the judgment that the --  those detainees would be kept in Guantanamo Bay and the Department of Defense would be responsible, along with an interagency group, of conducting interrogations for them.  There's a blurring of memory into all of this, and if you think about it, the pictures that one saw of Abu Ghraib were terrible.  And they represented abuses of people in our custody.  And that's wrong.  And that should not have happened.  And there isn't anyone connected with the Department of Defense who doesn't understand that, doesn't know it. [Translation: Nothing was wrong, and besides it's not my fault.] ...

Has it [torture in the gulag] been harmful to our country?  Yes.  Is it something that has to be corrected?  Yes.  Is it something that shouldn't have happened in the first place?  Yes.  Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS:  No.

RUMSFELD:  It doesn't.  Was it done as a matter of policy? No. [Translation: Nothing was wrong.  And at least we're better than people who chop off other people's heads.]

Now, I'm tempted to make some observations about Rummy's general approach to life, government and starting wars based on phony intelligence.  Back in the 1960s, people thought there was a "crisis of confidence" because national officials were out of touch with people's concerns about the Vietnam War.  But I'm not sure any Johnson or Nixon administration officials were ever reduced to arguing:  Hey, at least we're better than people who chop off heads!

I'm tempted to comment on how in most democracies, a guy who had done the things Rummy has done and then goes out in public and carries on this way would have been long since forced to resign his office, if not already prosecuted and imprisoned.

But I've learned an important lesson in the Bush Air Guard documents story.  Respectable news organizations like the Associated Press and the Washington Post use important experts like William Flynn and Sandra Ramsey Lines to enhance the credibility of their judgments.

So I consulted a couple of experts about Rummy's latest speech.  One of them, Maulana bin Haider al-Iraqi, is a leading expert in the field of forensic voice analysis.  After hearing a tape of Rummy's speech, he said that the way he intoned his th's and the syllable "pre", that he is definitely the personality type of a lying, arrogant bully.

Bin Haider was particularly struck by how evident this was when two th's came right together, as in "think that."  This Important Expert knows stuff that most of you don't.  So the fact that some of you reading this may have never before heard of the telltale symptoms displayed in th's and pre's just shows you should take his word for it.

I also asked another expert, Sheikh Ali al-Gitano, for his view.  After studying the film of the speech and examining close-ups of Rummy's right palm, Sheikh Al-Gitano declared that this man was doomed to be a lying, sneering bully for the remainder of his life.  Al-Gitano has 37 years of experience in palm personality analysis and is considered a leading authority in the field.

Now, there is plenty of other evidence that Don "we-know-exactly-where-the-Iraqi-WMDs-are" Rumsfeld is a lying, nasty, arrogant guy with the level of human empathy of your average sociopath.  But now I know that it has much more credibility when you have Official Experts giving their opinion.  Shoot, after this write-up I may get job offers from the Washington Post and AP!

In the interest of thoroughness, I should also add that Maulana bin Haider al-Iraqi and Sheikh Ali al-Gitano are both employed by the respected think-tank, Iranians for Theocracy and the Suppression of Jews and Christian Crusaders.  They are also the co-authors of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: The Greatest Statesman Since Muhammad.