It’s hard to imagine a more hypocritical attack than the one leveled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld against opponents of the Iraq War. Comparing them to Neville Chamberlain by calling them appeasers, the defense secretary is hoping to smash dissent.
Frank Rich — as he often does — offers the best rejoinder to this:
Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?
Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — “beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks” — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had “disappeared.” American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.
According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld’s Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.
I don’t want to read too much into this, aside from pointing out that both parties have been prone to getting into the dirt with dictators and tyrants. Iran was the chief bogeyman back then, which explains the photo, but then the secretary and his minions (and the president) want us to forget our willingness to make nice with the bad boys and to believe that we only ever take the side of the angels.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 