Donald Rumsfeld On The Bus To Hell
Thoughts on the death of a powerful man
Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88. Natural causes. I will always remember him. He served as Secretary of Defense under President Gerald Ford in the 1970s and, most notably, during the early 2000s under George W. Bush, and was one of the chief architects of the controversial global war on terror that was a direct response to the attacks of 9/11.
During his second tour as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld was famously folksy and combative with the press when asked questions about the two wars he oversaw in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter becoming a violent quagmire shortly after the country was invaded on entirely false pretenses, specifically that Middle Eastern dictator Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11.
The majority of the country wanted heads on pikes after 9/11 so an all-out, ass-kicking, shock ‘n awesome invasion of Iraq was a surprisingly easy sell. It was a bipartisan opinion in 2003: someone had to pay for the World Trade Center and then some. Vengeance was in the air. There were anti-war protests but they were ignored by the media and most people. At that point, the Republicans had done an excellent job of convincing Americans that Al Queda was preparing to fly planes into their local suburban Olive Gardens.
