Rumsfeld, America, and apologies

A friend recently asked me what I really had learned since 9/11, how my sense of the world had changed. That event and its consequences have so dominated my life for the last 10 years that it took me a minute to consider, and I was surprised at my response. I told him that I never expected to live in a country whose government officially embraced torture.

So I am a bit disgusted when I see cracks like this one out of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "I think he [President Obama] has made a practice of trying to apologize for America.… I personally am proud of America." I’m proud of my country, too, but I could be prouder if Rumsfeld and his colleagues in the Bush administration hadn’t, during their post-9/11 panic, endorsed torture, either as a matter of policy (in the intelligence community) or through neglect (in the military, where in 2003-05, soldiers lacking guidance from people like Rumsfeld sometimes assumed the enemy in Iraq should be treated as terrorists without rights).

Torture and other abuse of people under American control was more than a crime; it was a strategic blunder: You can’t win a war by undermining your own values, the things your country stands for. (Nor should you start wars on false premises, btw.) If that were not enough, the inept conduct of the war overseen by Rumsfeld in Iraq for three years until he was defenestrated late in 2006 almost certainly helped inflame the insurgency and so resulted in the deaths of American soldiers. Maybe he could apologize for some of that?