RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: That statist murderer Rumsfeld spruiking his lying memoirs  Fri Mar 04, 2011 3:17 am | |
| Donald Rumsfeld was spruiking his new memoirs on radio last week, when he was asked for his take on the revolutions in the Middle East. His response did nothing to dispel deep cynicism about United States foreign policy goals in the region.
You might have expected him to at least mention democracy. Maybe say something about the empowerment of Arab citizens? Or about the end of brutal regimes that tortured their own people? Perhaps make some reference to the role that poverty and inequity have played in bringing about the incredible transformations?
But instead the Bush administration defence secretary zeroed in on the only thing that really mattered in his eyes. That is, what the changes in the Middle East mean for US interests.
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Rumsfeld: "I think what's happening is that we had good relations with many of the governments in there, in that region, and it was contributing to a stable situation with respect to the generally hostile attitude towards Israel". He singled out Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the ayatollahs in Iran. "So you could get the Muslim Brotherhood who are radical extremists over Egypt which would be terribly dangerous."
You might think Rumsfeld's views were to be expected. They reflect a pragmatic, realpolitik appraisal of the impact the dramatic changes in the Middle East will likely have on US foreign policy goals, as regimes previously accommodating of America lose their grip on power.
But they also jar.
After all, they are coming from a big figure in a US administration that, for eight years, justified its foreign policies - from Guantanamo Bay to the invasion of Iraq - on the ideological basis of supporting "freedom".
What one gleans from Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown: A Memoir, however, is that while the Bush administration might have been publicly spouting ideology, privately its defence secretary was a bit more hard-nosed about what was really driving America.
Rumsfeld served in every Republican administration from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. His memoirs are very selective, as you might expect, and the man who emerges is not the disingenuous warmonger many might remember from the last decade, but rather - in his own most careful estimation - a thoroughly wise and practical man.
Rumsfeld tells of his unease when, with no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, President Bush began describing the US mission in terms of bringing democracy to the country. "It was hard to know exactly where the President's far-reaching language about democracy originated," he writes. "It was not a large part of his original calculus in toppling Saddam's regime."
Pragmatic, too, on Uzbekistan, which offered its airfields for the war in Afghanistan. The Uzbek government also tortured dissidents. Rumsfeld does not disguise his disdain when, in a debate over whether to criticise the Uzbek government over the massacre by its security services of some 1000 protesters, Condoleezza Rice (then secretary of state) said "human rights trumps security". Rumsfeld: "I wondered if she had really thought that through."
Some of his ruminations are particularly difficult to swallow.
When he expresses regret, it is not of the kind one might expect from an administration that invaded Iraq on the basis of fabricated intelligence, or set up a prison in Cuba that was condemned the world over and was run according to rules that even American courts deemed illegal.
For instance, Rumsfeld describes the US reliance on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (there were none) to justify the invasion as "a public relations error that cost the administration deeply".
His one regret about Guantanamo Bay - in fact his "biggest disappointment as secretary of defence" - was that he could not marshal the resources to persuade the world what a great place it actually was.
The memoirs often feel disconnected from reality. But they are interesting to ponder as the Middle East transforms.
The Economist wrote this week of the Arab awakening that "after the wave of secular uprisings, it is the cynics who seem out of touch, and the idealists have turned out to be realists".
But is it that simple? Ideology was used to great effect by the Bush administration and its supporters who were intent on far more pragmatic goals. Sometimes we need to be just as wary of idealists as we do of hard-core realists.
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