Taking a Pass With Young Lives
Donald Rumsfeld ought to have a hard time with whatever conscience he has left.
Secretaries of Defense send people off to get killed in wars we agree with or don’t and that’s expected and the families involved work with their grief as best they can. It's their job. Lots of things go unexpectedly wrong in war and that’s part of the responsibility as well. War is never a sure thing and the issue is even more clouded since we changed the title of the Secretary of War to the Secretary of Defense. Semantics will carry you only so far.
But Don Rumsfeld is buying personal deniability at the cost of young soldiers spending years in prison for his sins and that’s unconscionable. Every day that Rumsfeld has breakfast, enters the waiting limousine, swaggers into his Pentagon office and exercises his freedom to be in that office, it’s at the cost of dead-ended young lives behind bars. Each night when he is chauffeured home to dress for this or that event at which he will be an honored guest,…