Inside the diseased mind of Donald Rumsfeld

Retired Secretary of Death and Destruction Donald Rumsfeld used to hand write some twenty to sixty notes, called “snowflakes,” each day. Robin Wright, of the Washington Post, has obtained some of them. They were not classified, but were deemed “for official use only.”

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Bigot, fear-monger, propagandist.

In 2004, Rumsfeld wrote that news reports about the failures in Iraq were due to applying the wrong standards. The right standards apparently have nothing to do with rising levels of violence, millions of refugees, failed reconstruction, and the disintegration of Iraqi society. The April 2006 call by some retired generals for his resignation had him recommending more fear-mongering:

“Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” he wrote.

Of course, by 2006, after five years of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, international terrorism had risen 25% in just the previous year! And later that year, the nation’s spy agencies had concluded that the Iraq war was worsening the terrorist threat!

People will “rally” to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”

There’s that word, again. Sacrifice? What, exactly, has anyone in the Bush Administration sacrificed? And other than our military personnel, what, other than our economic futures, have Americans been asked to sacrifice?

Rumsfeld also reveals his true genius as a strategist. It’s time to stop being defensive. It’s time to be aggressive. Not about the actual war strategy, mind you, but about defending the failed war strategy to the public. Further notes also reveal him wanting the public to understand that this great war will not have a clear ending, as did World War II; no, this war will go on and on, from Iraq to other places.

By April 2006, Rumsfeld was also concerned that a failure in Iraq would only benefit Iran. Well, everyone’s capable of getting something right! It would have been nice if he’d realized that the best way to have prevented Iran from so benefiting would have been to not invade Iraq, in the first place, but that’s probably thinking about it with the wrong standards. Anyway, the Bush Administration may now be working on a plan to prevent Iran from benefiting from their Iraq disaster, after all!

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a “worldwide insurgency.” The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to “end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world.”

Funny, I thought that was the goal of the Republican Party.

He then advised aides “to test what the results could be” if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Because, once again, it’s all about planning the marketing, not planning the actual war.

And there’s more about no one in the world understanding what’s going on. Not Europe. Not the United Nations. Not the media. No one. Wrong standards, everywhere. Rumsfeld’s special relationship with reality can apparently only be understood by Rumsfeld.

When a poll showed that 65% of Americans believed Bush had no plan for victory, Rumsfeld once again demonstrated his firm grasp of what was needed. Not an actual plan for victory, of course:

(H)e commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a “better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard.”

Rumsfeld at war. With the media. With the American public. With the international community. With sanity.