One Last Lie for the Road
by Robert Scheer
What the heck, I'll pop over to Iraq one last time for a
meet-and-greet with the kids I've sent to war. Thank goodness I'm not
going
to have to do this again, though; I was born an upbeat guy, but it does
get
to you knowing that the thing is such a bloody mess and yet more of
them are
going to be sacrificed.
Did I write a secret memo saying that I don't believe in this
thing
anymore? You bet! But you can't let the public in on that and just
cut-and-run. Jeez, how would that look for the Rummy Legacy? First I go
over
there back in 1984 and kiss Saddam Hussein's derriere in order to get
him to
take on the ayatollahs in Iran, and now I leave Iraq in the hands of
those
Iraqi Shiites who were trained in a decade of exile in Iran. Those are
the
insurgents I'm worried about, not those Sunni guys who used to be with
us.
Should I have tried to convince young Bush that Hussein could be
brought
over to our side? Probably.
Yeah, sure, the guy's a killer but he could have been our
killer-again. Did I know about his killing those Shiite villagers back
in
1982? Hey, I was fully in the loop, but that was then and this is now,
so
let him hang. Only, why did they have to limit his trial to crimes that
I
knew all about before we shook hands? Some darn columnist will dig up
that
photo and point out that if Hussein is guilty of war crimes, then maybe
I've
got blood on my hands. Phooey.
I'm not going down that negative road that finished off old Bob
McNamara's legacy. What a disappointment-this is a guy who could sell
us the
Vietnam War and then blows it by suddenly getting all squishy about the
truth when he's long retired. Jeez Louise, he was once my role model.
No
secretary of defense ever sold a losing war better. They think I've got
a
frozen smile, just look at those old pictures of Mac flying into Saigon
and
giving an upbeat assessment in the midst of carnage. Talk about
whistling
past the graveyard. And he stayed on the "We're about to turn the
corner"
message right to the end when LBJ fired him, just like Georgie Porgie
did
me.
But then he made his fatal mistake. Am I talking about being
silent on
Nam for the next 20 years while he hid out as head of the World Bank
like
Paul Wolfowitz? Heck no. It's smart to focus on saving the entire world
when
you've messed up just a part of it. No, where Mac went wrong was after
he
left the bank and wrote that memoir and did that "Fog of War"
documentary,
babbling on about how he was involved with getting over 58,000
Americans and
3.4 million Indochinese killed and how maybe he could be judged a war
criminal. Sheesh! Never, never, use those words when you're talking
about an
American statesman, for God's sake!-it's downright unpatriotic. Worse,
when
you're talking about yourself as a possible war criminal and you happen
to
be one of the most famous Americans. Well, you are just subverting the
dreams of ambitious young Americans for generations to come. You have
no
right to let down kids that way. They need heroes, and for better or
worse
we are all they've got.
Who else are they going to look up to? Malcontents? Like the
mothers
of kids who've died and are now questioning what it was all about?
Crimony!
Take the medals and shut up! I'm not going to let those kids down, so I
put
that brave smile back on and go back to Iraq and pretend once again
this is
all about preventing another 9/11. Hey, I'm a pro and I know what they
need
to hear: "We feel great urgency to protect the American people from
another
9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three." Does it make any sense when we
always
knew that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? Or when bin Laden is still
on
the loose and his protectors in the Taliban are on the rise in
Afghanistan?
Heck no. Do I believe it? Who cares? That's what I learned from working
for
young George and what his old man's Iraq Study Group doesn't get: Never
let
the facts get in the way of a good "war on terror" story.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Rumsfeld - One last lie for the road 
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