Son of Leo Strauss

In his extraordinary article, The Undertaker’s Tally, Roger Morris¹ chillingly, and deeply disturbingly, lifts the veil on the life, times and evil mind of the real Donald Rumsfeld.

Morris begins with Rumsfeld’s early years, his early political ambitions, his run for Congress with the aid of the subsequently infamous Jeb Magruder secretly smearing his opponent. Speaking of the later, dashed but not extinguished Presidential hopes of Rumsfeld and Cheney, Morris says

Historians will only guess at the rancor building in these two deeply ambitious, deeply disappointed figures at the president they had, George W. Bush, whom they no doubt saw as manifestly, maddeningly inferior. The Rumsfeld-Cheney recompense, at vast cost to the nation and world, would be their fierce seizure of power after September 11, 2001.

It sounds like what it looks like in hindsight; a right-wing coup which wrested effective control of the country from an incompetent, “pathologically unfit” president in order to put into effect a policy which had been brewing for years, as shown in the letter from the Project For The New American Century to President Clinton² in 1998.

Central to understanding the duplicity of Rumsfeld is his notorious relationship with Saddam Hussein, whom Rumsfeld was secretively funding, arming and supporting in his war with Iran.

There could have been little doubt that Saddam would use the considerable aid Rumsfeld was sliding under the table, and any larger gain from a better-armed war with Iran, to further the regime’s most aggressive weapons development, and to move from a U.S.-strengthened position to tyrannize all the more savagely Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. In the event, as Washington watched, he did it all – and no one could or should have known more than Rumsfeld.
….
Rumsfeld would be faulted for his pandering 1984 diplomacy in Baghdad to appease the tyranny (the gassing of the Kurds had already begun) after a timorous, hypocritical Washington statement denouncing use of chemical weapons. The toll of the policy would be much more. Iraqi chemical weapons plants bombed in the 1991 Gulf War and releasing agents to which some 100,000 American troops were exposed, the pandemic of the infamous Gulf War Syndrome, would trace in large measure to the materiel and technology afforded by Rumsfeld’s knowing acts seven years before.

He discusses the people who were around Rumsfeld, including the Zionists and their agendas.

He opened government as never before to men who habitually, automatically assumed that U.S. and Israeli interests were identical, with no objectivity about American policy in a Middle East they scarcely understood to begin with. Their ignorance and presumption were matched only by their zeal to cluster in decisive quarters of the new Bush regime where decisions of grand strategy, of war and peace, were now shaped and predetermined.

Historians will debate, too, the obvious blurred allegiance of what some call these American “Likudniks” with their utter conformity to the belligerent ultra-Zionist mentality of the Israeli right.

And he looks at the inevitabilities of Rumsfeld’s reign.

In blindly striking out after 9/11 — a reflexive, grandly opportunistic, richly self-satisfying political act in America — without seriously understanding the politics or history of either country, he plunged the Pentagon into blundering, plundering occupations that made the nightmares of 2007 and beyond nearly inevitable.

It is an astonishing piece of investigative writing which only a Washington insider could bring off this convincingly and which is essential reading for anyone struggling to understand how the US could have got itself into the mess it is in.

Naturally the Groveller General and his bureaucrats could have had no idea of any of this. If they did they could not have gone along with it so cheerfully.

¹Roger Morris served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon and resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute, he is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

²Project For A New American Century letter to Clinton
The letter from the PNAC to President Clinton is still proudly displayed on their website.

It is dated January 26, 1998 (Australia Day, appropriately enough)
It was signed by Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey and Robert B. Zoellick.

Khalilzad is an Afghan native, a Muslim, current US Ambassador to Iraq and probable next Ambassador to the UN. Bolton was Ambassador to the UN but was not confirmed. Look up the rest. Many or most of them are in the Administration, were in it, or advise it.

Some excerpts from the letter:

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

What the letter makes clear is that the Republican right was obsessed with attacking Iraq. All that was needed was a pretext. It is hard to interpret “our vital interests in the Gulf” as anything other than “oil”. No mention here of democracy, or freeing the enslaved Iraqi masses from tyranny.

Given the limited range of any of Iraq’s missile systems, who must the writers be suggesting could be endangered by Iraq? Well, Israel. So it appears that the writers wrongly assume that Israel is an “ally” of the USA. But this is not true. Nevertheless it is telling that those who have signed the letter assume it, or at least hope others will believe it. From their point of view it probably seems obvious.

If only they had not so arrogantly dismissed as misguided the “insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council”. They might not be in the quagmire they created.

And remember, these people are still in power and influencing – actually, dominating – world affairs. But, you know, they come across as not that bright and not that clever.