Donald Rumsfeld died on Wednesday, USA Today reports. He was 88 years old, an age thousands of Iraqis will never attain because of what Donald Rumsfeld did.

By early 2002, Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney turned the Pentagon’s attention to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, nearly captured in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, slipped away into Pakistan, where he was killed in 2011. In 2003, U.S. forces invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam from launching attacks with weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found, and the mismanaged American occupation led to a guerrilla war and sectarian violence.

Even today, it seems hard for people to tell the truth about the Iraq catastrophe. In fact, according to contemporary notes taken by one of Rumsfeld’s aides, he “turned his attention” to Hussein in the early afternoon of September 11, 2001. From the Guardian:

The actual notes suggest a focus on Saddam. "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin Laden]," the notes say. "Tasks. Jim Haynes [Pentagon lawyer] to talk with PW [probably Paul Wolfowitz, then Mr Rumsfeld's deputy] for additional support ... connection with UBL.”

Of all the embarrassments the elite political media committed in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the deification of Rumsfeld as some kind of granite-jawed Marlboro Man because of his quasi-cryptic bullshit is right there at the top. (It’s only rivaled by the credulous reception given to Colin Powell’s fairy tales at the UN.) Of course, as more and more young Americans came home in boxes, because the Zen SecDef had misread the entire strategic consequences of the invasion, and because he sent them out ill-equipped and badly armored, the famous, “You go to the war with the army you have,” quip became less and less clever. Rumsfeld was one of the prime architects of the worst foreign policy disaster undertaken by this country since it subbed in for France in Indochina. That’s Line One of the obituary, just as it should be the first line in those that are coming for Powell, and Dick Cheney, and the president that they served.

Is this fair? More fair than it appears, I’d say, because, until his star turn in the Bush Administration, Rumsfeld was a run-of-the-mill upper-level Republican apparatchik. He was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and then his Secretary of State, the youngest person to hold that job at the time. But then, after a 23-year hiatus as a corporate lawn ornament, he came back to the Pentagon and defined himself for all eternity as the man on whose watch we became a country that tortured people, a distinction that Rumsfeld bragged on long after he was fired in 2006. From CBS News in 2011:

Rumsfeld, in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that some former CIA directors have contended that people who were subjected to waterboarding - a harsh interrogation technique that many consider torture and illegal - during CIA interrogations had yielded invaluable information and that, as such, suspending the use of such techniques might be unwise.

You go to hell with the alibis you have.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.