Outside Counsel

Nicholas Kristof makes a valid point when he says that we may be rushing to judgment if we press for Donald Rumsfeld's firing over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. There are so many other valid reasons to want to see Rummy, and the rest of this bunch fired that screwing up the war that they lied about to get us in, and lied about when they told us how it would go, and lied about when they told us how much it would cost, and lied to us about how long we'll be there, that the sickening way that we are actually losing the war is really pretty trivial. Still, for what it is worth, I have now read Sy Hersh's New Yorker piece, and I find the reporting from the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who exposed Mai Lai more credible than the assertations of Bush and Cheney to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a swell job. There have been war criminals in our government before, of course: what is notable is the way that the persist in the body politic of the United States, like a low grade infection that flares up every now and then. How else do we explain Kissinger, after all. Indeed, the puscilamity of the present Bush administration is perhaps best understood as a residual of Kissinger's foreign policy: he was the big gun when they were all mopping up during the Ford Administration, and it is not hard to imagine them thinking that they would get things running right during the long period while they waited for their time to come again. The fact that our present President had a load of them on board when it was his turn only reinforces the idea that they reckon that this time is their last shot: however it is that they want the world to be, we are seeing them take their best shot at making it that way now.

What I find odd is that so many conservatives seem to think that the project is consistant with their view of how the world should be.