Rumsfeld at home

September 10, 2007 12:15 PM

"I sleep fine." Donald Rumsfeld interviewed in GQ. Most of the things you want him to acknowledge? "I'm not going to get into that."
posted by Kirth Gerson (49 comments total)

Everything would be so much better if he would just resign.
posted by smackfu at 12:15 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

I wish more interviews would be titled more accurately as the press releases they are.
posted by mullingitover at 12:16 PM on September 10, 2007

I sleep fine.

He goes to bed on the pile of cash he has, not the pile of bodies we wish he had.
posted by DU at 12:17 PM on September 10, 2007 [3 favorites]

DR peers over his newspaper. "Oh, come on! She was so crazy about me that she ran off and got pinned to some guy in Colorado!"

"See?" says Joyce. "That still makes him a little mad, right?"

"Do you think it was a strategy?" Rummy asks me.

I think it was a brilliant strategy!

That reporter needs to be glassed.
posted by Pastabagel at 12:27 PM on September 10, 2007 [2 favorites]

What an odd little world he lives in, threaded among the airports and ranches of the real one.
posted by Drexen at 12:29 PM on September 10, 2007

By golly I take Ambien.
posted by Mr_Zero at 12:32 PM on September 10, 2007

I got through five pages of gushing banality before coming back here to report.

Seconding the glassing.
posted by Sk4n at 12:35 PM on September 10, 2007

That is, I don't think the reporter had much choice but to put on the brown nose necessary to get close to 'Rummy' without his head exploding - and his aggrandized, inward-turned existence is pretty clear despite that.

He picks up another newspaper. The headlines are full of news about Hillary, Barack, Rudy, McCain. Surely he has an opinion on how the election is shaping up.

"The what?" says Rummy.

The presidential election.

"I think, uh... I'm gonna eat my lunch now."
posted by Drexen at 12:35 PM on September 10, 2007

There's 5 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Another for the glassing.
posted by Webbster at 12:38 PM on September 10, 2007

My grandmother was replaced in her tennis group by Joyce Rumsfeld. The group evidently liked her a lot, though everyone understandably refused to talk about politics.
posted by gsteff at 12:43 PM on September 10, 2007

Seriously, did anyone expect anything else? None of the people associated with this administration is capable of admitting any mistake what so ever, or for that matter learning from mistakes.
posted by Belle O'Cosity at 12:44 PM on September 10, 2007

I couldn't get all the way through that piece of shit article...

He sleeps just fine. War criminal, subhuman scumbag, arrogant prick, he sleeps just fine... unlike the families of all the people he's sent off to their meaningless deaths.

All this just makes me fucking sick.
posted by dbiedny at 12:45 PM on September 10, 2007

What is even the point of interviewing these people? They are simply never going to answer any questions ever. They won;t do it under oath and they most definatly aren't going to do it for the benefit of some crappy reporter.
posted by Artw at 12:47 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

You mean he doesn't admit to being The Prince of Darkness? Well, then, I'm not going to read the article.
posted by papercake at 12:48 PM on September 10, 2007 [3 favorites]

And I'm pretty certain they all "sleep fine".
posted by Artw at 12:48 PM on September 10, 2007

A little water boarding might get some straight answers out of him.
posted by fleetmouse at 12:50 PM on September 10, 2007 [5 favorites]

That reporter needs to be glassed.

I don't know what that means. If it's anything along the lines of beaning him in the head with empty bourbon bottles and then slicing off his typing fingers with the broken shards, I'm with you.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 12:57 PM on September 10, 2007

I know it's appropriate to snarl about what a snowjob this article is, but as Artw said, would Rummy have even agreed to be interviewed if it weren't by some gushing, embarrassed, probably very young, secretively snarky but basically toothless GQ reporter (a reporter more interested in the "studly pilots" ferrying Rummy to his hideaway than in the man himself) whom he knew he could patronize ("Those aren't Taos shoes"), bamboozle, fluster, ignore, snort at, and sic his yapping dachshunds on without a scintilla of downside?
posted by blucevalo at 12:57 PM on September 10, 2007

“One area where he has no regrets is on the war in Afghanistan:

‘Look at Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets.’

All your theories worked there, in other words.

‘It’s been a big success!’

Perhaps in comparison to Iraq, Afghanistan has been a ‘big success.’ But in reality, the country has been abandoned in the war on terrorism:

– Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, recently said that security in his country had ‘definitely deteriorated.’ A former national security official called it ‘a very diplomatic understatement.’

– At least 20 Afghans were killed in two suicide bombings today. Such attacks are on the rise, with the Taliban carrying out ‘103 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in the first eight months of 2007, a 69 percent increase over the same period last year.’

– For the second year in a row, ‘Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007,’ led by a ‘staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province.’

Despite taking credit for the toppling the Taliban, Rumsfeld had a role in Afghanistan’s deterioration. In Feb. 2002, then Secretary of State Colin Powell proposed that ‘American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital.’ Yet Rumsfeld blocked his proposal. Rumsfeld only ‘reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops’ when the situation was clearly spiraling out of control.

When asked by the GQ interviewer whether he misses President Bush, Rumsfeld gave a ‘wry Rummy smile’ and replied, ‘Um, no.’ But he said he still sees Cheney. He also claimed that he continues to receive ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of letters ‘complimenting’ him on his service to the country.”^*
posted by ericb at 12:58 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

gushing, embarrassed, probably very young, secretively snarky but basically toothless GQ reporter

...educated at the Derrick Zoolander Institute for Kids who Can't Read Good.
posted by dzot at 1:04 PM on September 10, 2007

He also claimed that he continues to receive ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of letters ‘complimenting’ him on his service to the country.”

Deer Mister Rumfield:

"My name is Aaron Berwick and I am a studant in my fist grayd hear in Foenix, Arizona. I haf a pet dog named Bushy and a fishie named Sam. My dog isnt very smart. He's really stoopid. I am riding to you today since my techur Miss Wescott asxed us to write to someone famus. I pulled yor naME outa the hat. So this is why I am riting today. How are you? What doi you do for fun. Who are you andf what do you do?"

posted by ericb at 1:07 PM on September 10, 2007

I bet his ranch is easy to find with Google Earth.
posted by fandango_matt at 1:18 PM on September 10, 2007

In my mind, he is hanged with piano wire.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 1:42 PM on September 10, 2007

Do you know who else sleeps fine at night?
posted by felix betachat at 2:01 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

I had high hopes for Ari Fleischer when he left the administration. I really thought he had left because he just could no longer stomach being paid to lie, and lie egregiously to the public. Those fears were dashed when I saw his first post press secretary interview on the Daily Show. Apparently he really did just want to spend more time with his family, probably the sole truth he uttered in public life.

Rumsfeld's heart is a black as coal. He'll go to his grave saying that he did the right thing. McNamara will do the same, but unlike Rummy, he'll at least he'll have the courtesy to actually look tortured while doing it.
posted by psmealey at 2:03 PM on September 10, 2007

I live close to Rumsfeld, within a couple miles, though I've never met him. He isn't that popular around here - this is Democrat country - and he's sort of an urban cowboy. Also, I don't have enough money to matter to him. Fine by me. I hope we never run into each other around town, because I'd find it very hard not to tell him exactly what I thought of him, and really, I'd rather not talk politics that way. But it would be hard to ignore it.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:05 PM on September 10, 2007

By glass, do you mean this (definition 6 in urban dictionary): "to totally destroy something with REALLY big guns and stuff (representing the ground being heated and fused into glass)?"

Anyway, the reporter definitely needs to be taken out behind the woodshed. "Snide" is not a good angle to take for this interview.
posted by taliaferro at 2:16 PM on September 10, 2007

Why shouldn't Rumsfeld sleep fine? His DOD demolished two horrific governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then he turned it over to the US State Department to help the citizens of these countries develop governments through free elections. Don't throw Rummy under the tank treads, just because the State Department can't get its act together, L. Paul Bremmer was a total idiot, and large number of Iraqis thought it would be more fun to have a sectarian bloodbath rather than take the opportunity to build a stable government.
posted by humanfont at 2:19 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

According to an interview with the BBC, Joe Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle about the torture at Abu Ghraib, isn't sleeping quite as well:

After handing over a compact disc of the abuse photographs to the Criminal Investigation Division of the US Army, Joe says that he slept with a gun in hand every night because he feared reprisals from the accused soldiers.

Despite demanding that he be kept anonymous, Joe's name was revealed to the American public on live television when then US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld thanked Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs.

Joe doubts that Rumsfeld made his name public by mistake. Joe said: "I don't think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted.

"But I did receive a letter from him which said he had no malicious intent, he was only doing it to praise me and he had no idea about my anonymity. I really find it hard to believe that the Secretary of Defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anonymous."

However, once his name had been revealed, Joe said that "90 to 95 per cent of the soldiers in my unit shook my hand. It was back home where the backlash started."

Joe said there was a lot of animosity towards him and his family. Initially his wife fled to her sister's house which was vandalised with graffiti and both were later placed under protection.


posted by jamjam at 2:23 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

That's the first time I have seen this blame for this thing laid at the feet of the State Department. Forgetting for a minute Rumsfeld's insistence and intransigence on launching the war on the cheap, neglecting to provide the troops proper gear and materiel, removal of any experienced general officer who suggested that his troop estimates were far too low to be effective, and the fact that they have totally failed in the mission to capture at least a couple primary targets of the initial invasion (Mullah Omar and Bin Laden), tell me more!
posted by psmealey at 2:24 PM on September 10, 2007 [4 favorites]

I think they mean "glassed" in the sense that retards talk about turning Iran into "a sheet of glass".

In all seriousness, I think Rumsfeld should be given a fair trial. Just like Hermann Goering.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:33 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Ah, yeah, I remember now why I avoid reading GQ.

Say...aren’t all pilots studly?
All the ones I’ve known have balls of steel and are pretty good eggs (if a bit cocky).

That picture really puts the hook in me tho. I can just see a mushoom cloud in the background and Rummy, lord of chaos, with that same beaming open mouth cackle.
Where do I get one of those Rummy range targets?
posted by Smedleyman at 2:38 PM on September 10, 2007

To glass - to strike in the head with a glass object, usu. a beer mug or beer bottle. Etym. Begbie, Trainspotting: "That lassie got glassed and no cunt leaves here 'til we find out what cunt did it!"

See also Glassing, People in Need of Same
posted by Pastabagel at 2:38 PM on September 10, 2007

I'm nearly certain the glassing references are to this FPP: Everyone featured on this site requires a fucken glassing.

It was a pretty worthless thread and a horrid idea, but if anyone were to convince me otherwise, it would be Rumsfeld.
posted by Malor at 2:43 PM on September 10, 2007

Rumsfeld wouldn't let the State department within a mile of the pre-war planning, and was initially resistant to letting them do squat about the occupation. He had a vision for reforming the military, he wanted it borne out in Iraq, and he fought hard to keep reality from intruding in the form of the Middle East experts at State. He instigated and perpetuated a ridiculous bureaucratic pissing war that led directly to the reasonably successful invasion's disastrous aftermath.

The CPA was never really under State's control anyway -- veteran foreign service personnel were barred from assignment there by the Bush administration in favor of Heritage Foundation interns and useless Republican bureaucrats from flyover states. It was only when it became the *cough* Embassy (and Jerry Bremer fled back to CONUS in disgrace) that it became State's bag.
posted by xthlc at 2:45 PM on September 10, 2007 [4 favorites]

At least Robert McNamara had the ability to question his transgressions in retrospect Heydrick Rumsfield will never rise above the tenebrous troglodyte MF that he has always been.
posted by Rancid Badger at 3:01 PM on September 10, 2007

Release the hounds.

Ari Fleischer is shilling for Freedom's Watch, a "new group of prominent conservatives [which] plans to begin a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign [on August 22, 2007] to urge members of Congress who may be wavering in their support for the war in Iraq not to 'cut and run'."

That's the first time I have seen this blame for this thing laid at the feet of the State Department.

Fuck that. The Bush Administration shitcanned the State Department's pre-invasion Future of Iraq project, which warned CENTCOM about "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security."
posted by kirkaracha at 3:02 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine showed up at a small protest of Rumsfeld's appearance at the Army War College. He and his five-month-old son made the evening news:
"Why are you here?"
"Young Aidan has never seen a real live war criminal in the flesh, so I brought him here today so he could learn what one looks like."
I'll see if I can get him to put the video on YouTube or something.
posted by exogenous at 3:25 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Why shouldn't Rumsfeld sleep fine? His DOD demolished two horrific governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then he turned it over to the US State Department to help the citizens of these countries develop governments through free elections. Don't throw Rummy under the tank treads, just because the State Department can't get its act together, L. Paul Bremmer was a total idiot, and large number of Iraqis thought it would be more fun to have a sectarian bloodbath rather than take the opportunity to build a stable government.

Um, don't blame me that the the doctors couldn't repair your severed hand. I just saw that it was trapped in that pair of handcuffs and I just knew you would want it out. I helped you by cutting it off, and it isn't my fault those lazy MDs haven't figured out how to sew it back on yet. Jeebus, you try to help...
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:41 PM on September 10, 2007

But what if the article is right?

What if Rumsfeld is really a genuinely nice guy who got hundreds of thousands of people killed?
posted by bicyclefish at 4:47 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Some people, even people who have done monstrous things, can still have an almost spooky normalcy afterwards. Nazis who choked babies to death or threw toddlers off of bridges would go home and kiss their children.

Human behaviour, and our capacity for rationalisation, is amazing to me.

Rumsfeld is a liar, a war criminal and a coward. I won't say that hope his end is painful, but I won't shed a tear if it is.
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:50 PM on September 10, 2007

/long post, sorry, bit of a civics lesson
The SecDef is responsible for the formulation and execution of defense policy.
The Commanders of the Unified Combatant Command are the guys who demolish stuff, they’re the warfighters (you’d think Joint Chiefs of Staff, but they don’t have command authority otherwise Shinseki might have been listened to when he said we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops to provide security to the Iraqi people just going in).
/little known factoid: they were called commanders in chief - phonetic acronym sinks, now they’re cocos, blame Rumsfeld. No, seriously.

So Iraq was Rumsfeld’s policy baby.
And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is perhaps the doofyiest idea... let me put it this way. Special forces tactics are special forces tactics because they’re special forces, not because (or not solely because) special forces are superior forces (they often are higher quality, but that doesn’t dictate the tactics they use).
Speed, mobility, air support, all good things. Not, however, a substitute for infantry support and taking and holding ground. Want to break certain stuff and kill the just right folks? Special forces are great. Speed is a force enhancement. Want to take and hold a city? Not so much. (What you don’t bring, you ain’t got. Two of something = 1, one = none.)
Rummy forced a scale back of tanks brought to the battlefield and changed the deployment of forces.
(Decent rule of thumb for your lead tank column, have reserves about 3 days behind you)

High tech combat systems are meant mostly for defense, not in design, but economically, that’s how it works out. You can’t keep all that overhead running for long periods while you’re opponent can hold or blend into the civilian population.
No matter how fast you can get there with how much, you’re going to lose if your enemy can strike and fade. Doesn’t matter if you can strike and fade too, or that you can do it 10x’s better, because you’re trying to hold ground and provide security - at least in theory - in Iraq.
Even if you’re not, the political end needs that support otherwise you create chaos at best, and at worst create civilian support for your opponent.

I’m not a big fan of the Powell doctrine, but it does have two features I consider (militarily speaking) critical - #1 support and #2 an exit strategy. (international support, et.al I’d consider a realpolitik feature, albeit a critical one)
An exit strategy is not a political feature. You have to establish victory criteria and goals in order to appropriately devote manpower and resources to them. American troops have won a great number of tactical victories but tactics, no matter how superior or speedy, cannot convince an enemy to stop fighting on their own short of genocide. Which is another massive flaw in Rummy’s doctrine. Dedicated guerillas don’t just roll over because they’re faced with superior firepower. Once any force cedes conventional warfare their long term goals are to sap the opposition political body’s will to fight no matter what kind of damage they take.
We saw this with the Mujahideen when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Those people got the crap kicked out of them for 9 years, the Soviets lost maybe 3/4 of a million (give or take) and a bunch of military equipment, the Afghans lost multi-millions in casualties, displaced people, Kandahar was practically flattened, their livestock populations were decimated, infrastructure was torn apart (and then they had a civil war which killed more people and broke more stuff) and hell, there are still Soviet land mines going off. But 9 years they didn’t back off. It wasn’t just due to our support either.
So everyone should have known better, and in retrospect, nearly everyone did and pretty much said so and were steamrollered.
Iraq was a massive military failure not because we failed to achieve objectives, but because the few objectives set were unachievable due to policy constraints and parameters by the civilian political body overseeing the military.
That’d be Rumsfeld and the Bush administration.
And that failure is not mitigated by any degree of tactical success the military has had in it’s performance - even though those successes are all the more impressive because of those constraints - because there has been little concerted effort (beyond force) to end the fighting which is the objective of any military.
(Granted there has been some change in tactics of late, but Rummys been out of the job for a bit, eh?)

In any cold evaluation of Rumsfeld doing his job he’s been a colossal failure.
That’s all politics aside, the reasons to go, all that. That’s just from a military perspective as to how the operation was run at the policy level.
It’s conjectural on my part, but it appears to me most of this war, the parts that aren’t by design funneling money to war profiteers like Haliburton, mistakes were made due to the massive ego and arrogance on the parties involved.
But what do I know, I don’t even have a horse.

(and I agree with xthlc and kirkaracha, et.al on the hosing of the state department)

/Well, you would support the Nazis, wouldn’t you - chuckdarwin
posted by Smedleyman at 5:49 PM on September 10, 2007 [5 favorites]

At least he isn't on the cover of GQ. Cause, you know, that would hurt circulation.
posted by orange swan at 5:57 PM on September 10, 2007

Rudolf Hoess, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, was devoted to his wife and children, loved animals and dreamed of farming as a livelihood. He also slept very well at night. This is the is same 'banality of evil,' that Rumsfeld embodies.
posted by Rancid Badger at 6:32 PM on September 10, 2007

If only Rummy would have told us where the WMDs were....
posted by rougy at 7:13 PM on September 10, 2007

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
posted by kirkaracha at 8:41 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Of course Rumsfeld isn't evil, it's far worse than that, he's INCOMPETENT.
Nobody plays the vilain in their own life story, horrible things happen when we let clowns take control.
posted by greytape at 8:00 AM on September 11, 2007

Don't forget IMPOTENT and INCONTINENT.
posted by Reggie Digest at 1:26 PM on September 11, 2007

We're losing in Afghanistan too: Contra Donald Rumsfeld's rosy assessment, the country looks a lot like it did on Sept. 10, 2001.
posted by homunculus at 1:24 PM on September 13, 2007