How does a personally decent and intellectually alert human being become responsible for the US embracing torture techniques from the Communist Chinese and launching a war against Iraq with no planning for the aftermath? Since I’ve known Rummy for a long while, and liked him until the evidence that he is a war criminal became overwhelming, it’s a question that fascinates me. So it’s good news that Errol Morris has interviewed Donald Rumsfeld for 35 hours for his new documentary, The Unknown Known. Sharan Shetty introduces the teaser seen above:
Rumsfeld was notorious for his “snowflakes” – the thousands of memos he sent during his time in Congress and the Pentagon, and as secretary of defense – which often employed a sort of bureaucratic poetry. (A particularly abstract briefing provided the title for Morris’ film.) In this brief clip, Morris explores the rationale behind these memos, many of which provided the foundation for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
Scott Feinberg thinks the film lacks the emotional force of Morris’ 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, in part because Rumsfeld, unlike McNamara, refuses to admit any mistakes. Still, Feinberg finds The Unknown Known compelling:
The most striking and, in some ways, disturbing thing about the doc is that Rumsfeld, even under the microscope of Morris’ Interrotron camera (which enables a viewer to almost see into the soul of an interview subject), actually comes across as smart, charming and mostly likable – save for a few creepy instances when he holds a smile for a little too long. … [I]t’s worth the price of admission to watch Morris, one of the world’s great minds and interrogators – who told the New York Times years ago that he has an “endless fascination” with the extent to which “people who engage in evil believe in some real sense that they are doing good” – put Rumsfeld in the hot seat. When Morris asks his last question, the subject’s face and response are priceless.
Can’t wait. Update from a reader:
That smile that Rumsfeld gives Morris and/or the camera at the end of the clip is beyond disturbing. It’s a knowing smile, a bullshitter’s smile. It’s enough to plunge me back into a deep outrage at the things that Rumsfeld and his old friend from the Ford administration Cheney did during those years. Who knows if they even really know it anymore; they’ve existed so long in denial that I know it must seem like the truth to them (I’ve had the experience, too). But I’m quite sure that in from 2001 to the start of the invasion in 2003, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Which was this: they parlayed the sense of shock, trauma, a need to trust in the government-as-protector, and a need for revenge on the part of the American public following the 9/11 attacks into an orchestrated campaign to walk the country into their preferred Iraq policy – regime change. It had long been their dream, and it dovetailed perfectly with their other national security pet projects – for Cheney, it was the “unitary executive” concept and total presidential power, for Rumsfeld, it was a “lighter” military lowering the threshold for more involvement worldwide and dominating the Defense vs. State department rivalry. Whether they knew the intelligence was faulty, they acted in bad faith by taking only those intelligence reports that supported their views and denigrating the intelligence (and those connected to it, such as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame) that questioned their views. They willfully acted contrary to the administration’s stated policies and blamed the rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats when found out.
But most galling of all, they acted with clear disregard for the safety and well-being of the service men and women they sent into Iraq and came close to breaking the whole goddamn Army (close enough that someone can make a convincing argument that they actually did), and in doing so thought that they were right about everything all along (smugness). I don’t know how someone like Colin Powell or Lawrence Wilkerson can restrain themselves from beating the shit out of either of Rumsfeld and Cheney whenever they see them because I wouldn’t be able to if I were them.
The Dish 