It is generally bad form to kick someone when they’re down — and as death is unquestionably the ultimate form of being down, this guideline doubly applies in the matter of obituaries and assessments in the immediate aftermath of a person’s demise. Not only is he or she not around to defend themselves, any criticism runs the risk of bringing additional pain to the survivors of the deceased.
But the passing of Donald Rumsfeld last week is a reminder that every guideline has its reasonable exceptions. In this case, our collective need to speak the truth about exceptionally odious political figures is a necessary carve-out to the general rule of not speaking ill of the dead. A democracy must be able to accurately judge the actions of its public servants, not only to hold them personally accountable, but to determine whether we want to stay the course or change policies and leaders. Without an ability or willingness to hold our leaders and public servants responsible for their actions — both the good and bad ones —by forming judgments about their actions, we may as well be a monarchy or a dictatorship.
When we take the occasion of someone’s passing as an opportunity to highlight the ways they’ve failed or betrayed the public trust, this signals the seriousness of the person’s offenses, and the overriding importance of defending the American people and democracy against those who have offended us. The delicacy of the moment, in other words, means that it is exactly the right time for the public to assess true public betrayals, both for the sake of the historical record, and with an eye to the future and deterring repeat offenses against our common good. I highly recommend these two pieces for an unflinching assessment of Donald Rumsfeld’s life and legacy.
Despite his decades-spanning career in public service — including time as a Navy pilot, congressman, and official in multiple Republican presidential administrations — the overwhelming facts of Rumsfeld’s career are the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the broader disaster of an ill-defined war on terror. His complicity in propagating lies in order to gin up an invasion of Iraq, in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, in the deaths of thousands of American service members, and in the use of torture against all standards of law and morality, are the truest measure of his disservice to our country.
We also need to speak the truth about Rumsfeld’s disastrous role in the George W. Bush administration because his actions, while crucial, were part of a broader, discredited vision of America as an imperialistic superpower, using military force in an impossible and quite possibly psychotic quest for domination. Given the destructiveness of this vision to the world and to this this nation, we should not pass up an opportunity to highlight its depravity, and reinforce our collective resolve to resist such visions in the future. Rumsfeld is not a figure out of some distant, barely discernible past. We are still living with the consequences of the unforgivable decisions of the administration he served; Rumsfeld’s amoral and incompetent role still affects us. The continuation of the catastrophe in the Middle East that he helped launch is the crowning reason why we should resist all efforts to whitewash his record. This is far beyond more ordinary political conflicts, such as whether a politician might have been wrong about tax policy or the proper size of the Department of Education. Rumsfeld’s role as Defense Secretary under George W. involved deaths counted in the hundreds of thousands.
That said, Rumsfeld’s catastrophic final act in public service makes it more important, not less, to be aware of the breadth of his life, his ordinary and extraordinary achievements, such as raising a family and being elected to Congress for multiple terms. As important as it is to condemn those who use their power to mislead and betray the American people, it’s also crucial that we remember their basic humanity, and are open to contemplating that very few people are all bad or all evil. I would submit that Rumsfeld’s greatest flaw was a dehumanization of the many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead at the hands of the conflicts the U.S. invasions unleashed, a sense that their lives didn’t count nearly as much as American ones. This is a sickness shared by many American politicians, but one that can’t be answered by denying their humanity in turn. It’s okay to be uncomfortable with grudging admiration for this obviously driven man, or to feel disoriented at how easily an unobjectionable public service can slide into mass death and mass deception. We can judge Rumsfeld’s life in the harsh light it deserves while also acknowledging its complexity.