Donald Rumsfeld Was a Bloodthirsty Warrior for the Free Market
The American warfare state’s upper reaches are filled with bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. But few have been as deranged as Donald Rumsfeld, whose appetite for imperial violence combined with free market zealotry produced one of the most spectacular failures in all of US military history.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks to the soldiers at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, 2001. (Marc J. Kawanishi / Getty Images)
No other figure in my lifetime has embodied the vain, cruel, and ultimately self-defeating hubris of American militarism more powerfully than Donald Rumsfeld.
This is not only because he was a monster who steered the country into two unconscionable wars based largely on his romantic disdain for reason, his unwillingness to acknowledge any reality beyond that created by his own actions. That he was this kind of monster is true, of course, but it hardly made him unique in the US foreign policy establishment, of which Rumsfeld was a leading light for almost five decades.
Rumsfeld embodied the peculiar pathology of modern American militarism better than anyone because, in important respects, the All-Volunteer Force was a twisted object of his own invention. He wasn’t alone in devising it, of course. But the All-Volunteer Force came into being under Rumsfeld’s direction and, thirty years later in Iraq, reached its arguable apex on his watch, too.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.