Into the Great Unknown Unknown

It is an obituary which, I confess, I read with pleasure... Donald Rumsfeld has passed into the great Unknown Unknown.  Among the evildoers of the Dubya Maladministration, Rumsfeld was perhaps the most grotesque, the architect of many a failed Foreign Adventurism policy.  Acting as a foil to the possibly more evil Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld used the elective Iraq War as a means of testing his military doctrine while Cheney was primarily concerned with boosting his stock portfolio with no-bid, cost-plus contracts.  As an aside, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, eventually killing more than 600,000 American civilians, I would have considered the Dubya Maladministration worse than the Trump Maladministration.

My real wrath lies with the media, which fawned over Rumsfeld, even as he spouted complete blatherskite about a war which was ill-advised, poorly conducted, and, frankly, evil.  While I can parse this statement from Rumsfeld, it still scans as deranged, a sort of 'thought-terminating cliche' to prevent too much scrutiny about the reasons for the Iraq invasion:

 

Conducting the war, Rumsfeld had a flippant attitude towards the military personnel who questioned his incompetence in providing matériel for the war effort:

 

The most damning thing about Rumsfeld is that he could confidently state that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he sold nerve toxins to Saddam Hussein when Iraq was fighting a ten-year war against Iran.  Here are the two in happier times:

 

Rumsfeld could be likened to a Bizarro Judas Iscariot, betraying an evil man rather than a good man.

Rumsfeld's legacy is horrific- countless Iraqi dead, thousands of American dead and tens of thousands of American wounded, the rise of ISIS in the Levant and Fertile Crescent, and a refugee crisis that has engulfed Europe, resulting in the deaths of uncounted migrants.  I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of 21st Century individuals I consider as evil as this man.

I haven't been watching any mainstream media coverage of Rumsfeld's death, I suspect they will completely ignore the evils that he perpetrated, while a satire website and a teen fashion magazine get it right.  People remember, though, as one can glean from a Twitter feed on which Rumsfeld's PR team forgot to turn off the comments:

A statement from the family of Donald Rumsfeld: pic.twitter.com/AlKYxVvqgF

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) June 30, 2021

The planet is better off with him gone.