Free Donny

By Carl J. Luna/HispanicVista.com

Enough with all the chanting for Don Rumsfeld's head. Okay, as Secretary of
Defense, he does have ultimate responsibility for what occurs under his watch. And, yes, allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners (and even the killing of a few) have been hung up in the Pentagon pipeline for review by senior officials for months. But the calls for Rumsfeld's bureaucratic execution are misplaced.

Most of the Democrats who are screaming for Rumsfeld's head are doing so to try and smear Bush through Rumsfeld for the action of a group (not a handful or a few, mind you, as apologists keep saying - you don't perpetrate such activities on such a wide scale at a military facility without a large number of people either being involved or committing the sin of omission by turning a blind eye) of aberrational sociopaths.

Rumsfeld doesn't deserve to hang for what happened in Abu Ghraib prison. You put 20 and 30 somethings thousands of miles from home in conditions of stress and you're going to have a least a small percentage going "Lord of the Flies" on you. (Heck, a more than small percentage of our population goes postal every year back home where there's fast food on every corner and wide screen TV's in just about every living room.) If we as a nation go to war we had better well be prepared to discover that at least a few of our proud warriors for freedom are going to become vicious sociopaths.

(I remember reading someone years ago -- maybe Noam Chomsky or some such-writing that the people we give medals to for heroism in times of war we lock up in an asylum in times of peace. Probably true. How many of you would like to ride on the trolley next to someone who looks like they'd be willing to jump into an enemy foxholes with guns blazing, willing to kill a half dozen people or be killed trying?)

So, if you want to hang Rumsfeld for the actions of a little--or even a lot--of to be expected wartime sociopathy, sadistry and plain old human evil, you better reconsider your whole commitment to this war or to any other. You send soldiers to war and atrocities happen. War is organized atrocity, after all.

No, if you're going to hang Rumsfeld, at least hang him for the right reason. If you want to hang him, hang him because he wasn't up front and fully honest about just what invading a fairly large country with a very divided population including more than a few ideological religious zealots and the heinous leftovers of a deposed tyrannical regime would actually entail. Hang him for selling the American public in 2002 and early 2003 on the idea that a combat force 1/4 the size of the one assembled for Gulf War I could accomplish a massively bigger strategic objective in a matter of months.

Hang him for firing both a theatre general and "civilian administrator" for trying to contradict his assertions that a micro-American occupation force could maintain order in an ethnically divided state infiltrated by a horde of anti-American terrorists (the ones we were supposed to be hunting down in the first place). Hang him for supporting the fiction that the US could overthrow Saddam Hussein--who could only keep Iraq together in one piece by the most heavy handed and hideous of dictatorships--and, within a little more than a year, turn over power to a new "democracy." Hang him for perpetuating the fiction that the interim government to be constituted by June 30 could ever have been something more than a polite facade behind which America finds itself committed to a long-term occupation.

There are all manners of good reasons to hang Donny Rumsfeld. But, then again, if you hang him for any of the above mentioned, you probably should line up a bunch more ropes on that bureaucratic gallows for other members of the Bush foreign policy team. And at least two on the electoral gallows, as well. But don't go hanging him just because we are all suddenly shocked to discover that war is a terrible thing.

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Carl J. Luna, Ph.D., a HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) contributing columnist, is Professor of Political Science at San Diego Mesa College. Contact at cluna@sdccd.net

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