Sun, September 3, 2006
A letter to Rummy
By ERIC MARGOLIS
To U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:
Dear Rummy: In your speech to the American Legion in Salt Lake City
last week, you compared critics of your wars abroad to appeasers of
Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Allow me to disagree, Mr. Secretary.
I'm also a member of American Legion - Post 7, Toronto - and I
don't agree with all those well-meaning but insular vets who cheered
you in Utah. What most of them know about Iraq or Afghanistan
wouldn't fill a golf ball.
So you may hornswoggle these good souls by claiming the administration
is re-fighting World War II against "Islamo-facists," i.e., reborn
Nazis disguised as wicked Muslims.
What ever would we do without those all-purpose Nazis?
I hear you called Saddam Hussein a Nazi. Excuse me, were you not the
Reagan Administration official who went to Baghdad in 1983 to offer
Saddam military, financial and intelligence support in his war of
aggression against Iran? Time for your memory pills, Rummy.
I opposed keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan, fearing, as has happened,
that they'd get stuck in a no-win guerilla war. Before you invaded
Iraq, I wrote Saddam had no WMDs, and predicted the U.S. would face
guerilla and civil war, and a financial debacle, not flowers. Today, I
say get out of these lost wars before another American soldier dies.
I guess that makes me a 1930s-style "appeaser" and a leftie. A
neocon mama's boy from Canada, whose closest brush with combat was a
dinnertime spat between his parents, even had the chutzpah to call me
"unpatriotic" in a U.S. magazine article for opposing the Iraq war.
Next to my desk, I have a large framed Certificate of Recognition
bearing the great eagle seal of the United States, attesting to my
service to the nation during the Cold War. "We the people of this
nation are forever grateful," it says.
It's signed by you, Mr Secretary.
At home, I keep my army uniform in just case a real World War III
erupts - not the absurd, fairy-tale third world war against a rag-tag
bunch of Muslim extremists that the neocon fib factory claims we're
fighting, but a real war.
Rummy, I had hoped that you, as one of the few Bush administration
hawks who actually served in the armed forces, would not stoop to such
absurd claims, generated by the very same Pentagon neocons former
secretary Colin Powell called "crazies."
I know the president's new buzzword is "Islamo-fascist." It
focus-groups well in the Bible Belt and Miami. But I'm deeply
disappointed you would stoop to such cheap, insulting
Dr.-Goebbles-style propaganda.
As an educated man, you know fascism is a phenomenon of Western
industrial states in which racists and militarists join hands with
conservative parties and the military industrial complex to form the
fascist, corporate state.
Fascism is unknown in the Muslim world. Mussolini and Hitler were
Christians. The real closet fascists are in North America.
"Islamo-facist" is as meaningless as that favoured term of
anti-Semites, "Judeo-Nazi."
I'm a reluctantly retired Cold Warrior, not an appeaser. I've never
appeased anyone. But as an old soldier, modest military historian, and
war correspondent, I've learned all good generals know when to
retreat. Retreat is as useful a manoeuvre as attack. Only fools stay
put.
Brainless slogans like "stay the course" and "we won't cut and
run" bring applause at Legion conventions, but they are a recipe for
military defeat. It was precisely Hitler's monomaniacal refusal to
allow his 6th Army to retreat from encirclement at Stalingrad that
brought Germany its greatest defeat.
Your $300-billion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going nowhere. As a
Vietnam-era vet, I can tell you that pulling out of Vietnam, however
painful and humiliating, was also absolutely the right decision.
Forget WWII and face facts. The U.S. is not fighting Hitler, George
Bush is no Gen. George Patton, and Muslims are not Nazis in turbans.
--
"In the future you may be here, but will your dreams?"
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