this month marks 11 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and the legacy of that invasion is staggering. At least half a million Iraqis are dead, along with at least 4,400 American soldiers. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been left maimed and continue to suffer from mental trauma. One Harvard study estimates the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined will cost the United States as much as $6 trillion.
Errol Morris talking:
Things take on a logic of their own. I had made The Fog of War about Robert S. McNamara, a central figure, for me, as a young man, because of the war in Vietnam, one of the great disasters in American history. And I made the movie because of questions about that war. How did we get into such an incredible mess? Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers dead, millions of people in Southeast Asia dead. Call it the salt-and-pepper shakers or the bookends, but another disastrous war, another secretary of defense, and I decided that I wanted to do it again. Also, I had made a movie about Abu Ghraib, so there are a whole number of issues which are of great interest to me.
He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to provide an account of what he had done. I called him. I sent him a copy of The Fog of War in a letter. And I was told by his lawyer, Bob Barnett, that he would never, ever, ever speak to me. He said, “Forget about it. This is never going to happen.” But he did call me. I went to Washington. We met. And this film is the result.
He was extraordinarily successful at a very young age—four-term congressman from Illinois and then a whole number of Cabinet-level appointments in the Nixon administration. He was the youngest secretary of defense in the history of the country. Eventually, in the Ford administration, one of the youngest chiefs of staff, if not the youngest, before his assistant, Richard Cheney, took his place, and then the youngest secretary of defense. He has that distinction of being the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense, first time around for Ford and, of course, second time around for George W. Bush.
He wrote like 20,000 memos. They were called “snowflakes,” because there were so many of them, probably more than 20,000.
Strange, looking at the clips, even here. They’re clips, of course, that I’m more than familiar with, having spent so much time with Donald Rumsfeld and having spent so much time edited this movie. Things surprised me in the interview and still surprise me. Someone asked me, “Is he completely insincere?” And I said, “No, the problem is he’s completely sincere.” When he tells you he never read those torture memos, I don’t think he did. When he reads the laundry list of enhanced interrogation techniques, a.k.a. torture, he himself seems surprised by what he’s reading, as if he had never really carefully read them before. He suddenly says, “Good grief, that’s a pile of stuff.” There’s this odd disconnection between these policies and what he thinks he’s doing.
George Orwell, wrote about how language could be used by people in power to control others. Often, I think this is a new twist on the story. He’s controlling others, hiding things from others, and also hiding things from himself. The end of the story, he retreats into a kind of strange Looney Tunes world of language, where he thinks if he can just find the right set of words, everything will be OK.
My wife calls him the Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland. Alice says about the cat, “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin; I’ve never seen a grin without a cat.” It’s this strange, disembodied grin almost, this look of self-satisfaction, of pleasure, the cat that swallowed the canary. This is one of the strangest and most disturbing interviews I’ve ever done.
I had a desire to make a very specific kind of film. I call it history from the inside out. This was also true of McNamara, Fog of War. How do they see the world? The memos, the oral history is a way in. I didn’t interview 15, 20 people. I interviewed one person.
I interviewed only one person on camera. I actually interviewed two people on camera, but I knew I wasn’t using the second interview. It was an interview with his wife Joyce, who I very much liked.
But you asked me a question about whether there was one memo among these tens of thousands of memos that stood out among others. And I would say, yes, the most disturbing of the disturbing memos, of Rumsfeld’s greatest hits. Here’s a man of slogans and epithets and rules, etc., etc., etc. “Weakness is provocative.” “Pearl Harbor is a failure of the imagination.” But the most nefarious of them is: “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” And he said this to—guess who—the president of the United States. I see him reading this memo. Where does it come from? From the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was used by the British astronomer Martin Rees and by Carl Sagan. We’re looking for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. Universe is a very big place. We haven’t found evidence, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not out there. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
he’s talking about weapons of mass destruction. This gets transferred over to—guess where—Iraq. Where it makes no sense, I might add.
We all know that the various officials of the Bush administration, George W. Bush himself, will never be held accountable for most, if not all, of the things that happened under their watch. They can now sit back and crow about one thing or another and indulge in one form of partisan politics after another. Maybe that’s the most disturbing thing about this story. If they took us to war for no good reason, shouldn’t they be in some way held accountable for that fact? Isn’t that important to our democracy, that we just don’t simply sweep the past under the rug, that we deal with it in some fashion?
He tendered two resignations, neither of which were accepted by the president. He often wants to have it both ways. He will provide some gesture suggesting that he takes complete responsibility and on the other hand take none.
The word apology is not really part of his lexicon. No, there are no apologies.
The fact that he unendingly says things which are not true, about—he unendingly says things that are false. Does he even realize it? that is more shocking.
— source democracynow.org