Discussion for article #233406
Please. Go back under the rock you’ve been habitating in – or better yet, go for a nice European vacation! Like to the Hague. It will be extended, and you won’t have to pay for room & board.
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I want to commend Rumsfeld for finally taking responsibility for starting wars without end.
Your turn, Cheney and Bush.
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Our invasion of Iraq was like Germany annexing the Sudetenland?
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I’m trying make sense of his statements and failing utterly. Germans after WWII certainly said “I was just following orders,” etc., but before? Is the appeasement meme so strong that . . . oh, never mind, it just hurts my head.
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Comparing IS to pre-WWII Germany is such a misreading of history that…
Oh…wait a minute. —Checking the Godwin meter— Yep, it’s pegged. Never mind.
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Good thing we couldn’t see his erection.
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Those ISIS murderers know how to push our media buttons.
Ooooh ooooh oooh I got it, I got it—ISIS is like the period before WWII, so that makes Obama…Neville Chamberlain!!! It’s so easy!
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It’s those “Unknown Knowns” he’s talking about - I guess
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The crew is reassembling. I guess they figure it’s time for their next big heist, now that Obama’s put money back in the vault.
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we have you to thank for ISIS, Rummy. Saddam Hussein would never have allowed ISIS to occupy even a square meter of Iraqi soil.
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We should also be quite clear that they are also deliberately targeting even more Muslims. If Rumsfeld wants to make it a Christian vs. Muslim thing, he must take care not to conflate ISIS with all of Islam. Of course, we know Rumsfeld figures there’s always going to be a certain amount of breakage–he applied the business model to Iraq, and disaster followed.
He should not be allowed near anything remotely involved with any sort of policy. He’s a sloppy, careless fool who was a key in an administration that did more damage to our country than any in our history.
His stupid grin makes me ill. He’s probably heading home for a nice little lunch–grilled cheese and caviar served by drones.
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Lord, he’s simply dithering nonsense here. What the hell.
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Nah. Germany got the Sudetenland without violence, and the Sudetens did want to be a part of Germany.
But more substantially, Poland was more of a threat to Germany in 1939 than Iraq was to America in 2003. Now, Poland wasn’t much of a threat to Germany, but you could at least construct a case without giggling. Poland did have a big military (fifth biggest in the world at the time) and had annexed a good swath of the Soviet Union after engaging in aggressive war against it in 1920-1922. Poland was an industrialized nation and had a decent standard of living, at least in western Poland. Their populations were comparable.
Contrast that to Iraq in 2003, which was emaciated through a dozen years of sanctions, did not have a big military, and had a population less than a tenth that of the United States. When it had last waged war, Iraq couldn’t beat a country that had just had a bunch of religious wackos take control and shoot half its officers. Now, say that country is a threat to the United States, with a massive economy and half of all military spending in the world. Stop giggling.
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Is it just me, or Rumsfeld turning into Pat Robertson? He even looks like him.
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you know, that’s a good point regarding Poland taking a chunk of the USSR in the early 20s. 99 out of 100 Americans would not even know that. It certainly casts a somewhat different light on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Much of European history is like that - remembering the atrocities done to your own people while conveniently forgetting that perhaps your people did something that might have provoked the atrocities. A good example is the “foibe” in Italy. Towards the tail end of WW2, Yugoslavian partisans took to casting Italians in the disputed border area of northeastern corner of the nation (around Trieste) into these natural sinkholes. Only in recent years has Italy resurrected the memory of the atrocities of the foibe; seldom discussed and conveniently forgotten are the atrocities previously committed by Italian fascists against the Yugoslavs. That doesn’t make throwing people into sinkholes right, but it does explain why it might have happened much more satisfactorily than, “those people were evil and our people were innocent victims”.
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I think Rumsfeld cribbed this remark from an op-ed piece by Kagan in the WSJ from August or September which said something to the effect of the U.S. and Europe are repeating the isolationist and pacifist mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s. Kagan’s piece misses non-state actors and also ignores that if one can only arrive at the isolationist and pacifist conclusion if one avoids looking at colonies. Moreover, Kagan doesn’t point out that Germany in the 1930s was a European-superpower-in-waiting, unlike ISIL.
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The Islamic State’s Rise Is Like 'The Period Before World War II
Yup, except where is ISIS’s version of the Wehrmacht, the Lufwaffe and the Kriegsmarine? I really want to see ISIS’s equivalent to the battleship SMS Graf Spee. Who is ISIS’s version of Krups, I.G. Farben and other corporations and wealthy industrialists who financed the Third Reich? and saw war as a profitable enterprise? I could go on.
This man is an idiot!
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The nerve of these people! One of the prime architects of the rise of ISIL dares to show his face on the teevee? And now Jeb Bush admits that Paul Wolfowitz, John Negroponte and other geniuses that got us into Iraq are advising him. Huh? That alone should disqualify him!
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