Could this be why the war on Iraq was so thoroughly buggered up? Donald Rumsfeld, who used to kind of preside over the war, has some really strange notions about this war. Here’s one that he revealed only recently, in a post-termination interview with syndicated columnist Cal Thomas:

CT: With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?

DR: I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror. I don’t mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word ‘war’ conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn’t going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a ‘war on terror.’ Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So ‘war on terror’ is a problem for me.

Forget the grotesqueness of the analogy for a minute. More than half a million killed (not just dead, but killed; in our name; by this turd and his co-conspirators). Killed absolutely needlessly, in a pointless war of choice. And the only thing he regrets, the only thing he would like to change is one piece of rhetoric? Isn’t that a war crime in and of itself?

And now let’s jolly well come back to the grotesque analogy. I think Rumsfeld’s remark encapsulates perfectly — and in so many different ways — why things in iraq went so horribly wrong. There is no doubt that, over and above everything else, the Iraq war was a bloody marketing exercise. It was conceived as such, and managed as such. And this is the audience they were targeting, this is the audience they were catering to—people perceived as demanding “an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera”. That was the driving force behind Rumsfeld’s major miscalculations: going light (nowhere near enough troops) and going short (short-sightedly refusing to plan for anything other than the fantasy of a quick victory, followed by flowers and candy, followed by happily ever after). Because they were staging the war for an audience that would accept nothing else (or so they believed), the script allowed for nothing else.

Another light-shedding gem from the interview:

We have, without question, the finest military on the face of the Earth and, indeed, in the history of the world. We can’t lose a battle. And we haven’t, and we won’t.

Rumsfeld (and Bush, and everyone else involved in perpetrating this war) has always behaved as if this was just a war of rhetoric. As if all we needed to do was to keep proclaiming our superiority, moral and otherwise, and victory would inevitably be ours. The basic approach was: we don’t need to give the troops body armor, just tell them that we’re the best-equipped army in the world, that should be enough.

And how about:

CT: You’ve read the Iraq Study Group Report.

DR: I haven’t. I’ve read reports of it and gone through the executive summary.

Nobody bears more responsibility than this man for the way we have run the war on Iraq, and he hasn’t even bothered to read the ISG report? That speaks for itself, and just about takes the cake. It is precisely this combination of enormous arrogance and contempt for the opinions of others, this total lack of any sense of responsibility for the carnage we unleashed on the Iraqi people, this adamant refusal to recognize that any real changes are called for in our Iraq policy at all, all this is precisely what got us where we are today (in quicksand up to our chins), and precisely what allows so little hope of extricating ourselves and the Iraqi people from the mess anytime soon.

Because the most alarming aspect of the situation we are in now is that this arrogance and contempt, this lack of responsibility, this refusal to change policy is not just what characterized Rumsfeld’s approach to the war. It is what continues to characterize Bush’s approach. Rumsfeld will soon be gone, but this attitude is still in charge of our Iraq policy. That will continue to be the tragedy of Iraq.