Atrios wonders how it is that Donald Rumsfeld managed to retain his social standing in view of . . . everything. Sadly, the answer is all too obvious. Remember this?
This would change over time as the war went badly, but in 2003 it was wildly popular among Republicans and enjoyed majority support even among Democrats. In all, 72% of the country was in favor of the war.
And there's this:
Fundamentally, both the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners was popular. Given that, it makes sense that Rumsfeld was popular too.
This has been our history lesson for the day.
9/11 was a test we as a nation did not do well with. We panicked and let our supposed liberal democratic values slip away from us. I still remember the reportedly liberal Jonathan Alter making apologies for torture. In fact, some of my friends were decidedly mushy on this. Worse some fell back on Dershowitz's false ticking time bomb analogy.
Pretty much from Day 1 (that is, September 11, 2001), I had concluded that the eponymous terrorist attack revealed that the United States had a glass jaw -- we thought we were so strong, so decent. But both were brittle. The decency immediately flew out the window, with the Moslem hating, the embracing of torture (there was even a popular teevie series based on the American government torturing folks!!), Guantanamo and all the other black sites, and near-total rah-rah support for bombing ... Iraq?? WTF?
The brittleness of US strength was clear in the bumbled response to the hijackings, the frantic running around of the federal government (way to go, Georgie), and some twenty years of conventional military assault that ultimately yielded only our defeat to the Taliban.
The country still hasn't come to grips with the fact that the way it thinks of itself, and what others see, is way off. We can't improve until we realize that we need to.
+1
Not sure a 2003 poll on the war is a great metric for judging Rumsfield's popularity.
I don't think Kevin is offering it as a metric for anything. Rather, he is answering his own question--How did Rumsfeld manage to retain his social standing. The answer, it appears, is that his actions did not play badly with the public.
BTW, another factor, not mentioned by Kevin here, but surely relevant to that particular question, is that Rumsfeld was viewed as wrong by many Americans, but not as a phony or a hack by most.
The whole Bush administration and everybody in it benefited first by the Great Recession knocking the Iraq War out of everybody's consciousness, and then the Trump administration making Bush et al. look great by comparison. So that set of phenomena likely helped Rummy, too.
But using the popularity of the war in the first few months is really using an outlying point. Show me that poll in 2006 and I bet there would be a different story.
Not thrown out of "polite society"? Rumsfeld chose to spend his last years in artist/elitist liberal Taos, New Mexico. He was definitely not beloved there.
Speaking of torture, something tells me Hillbilly Fauxluxe J.D. Vance has more sympathy for Lynndie England than he does for Jessica Lynch.
I supported the authorization of force at the time. Not because of the overwhelming evidence presented, but by who was presenting it. If Collin Powell says we need it, then we must need it. They certainly must have more evidence that they can not share at this time. And it fell upon our country to be the world's policeman.
But then they didn't have enough troops to secure weapons caches and actually check for WMD. They were not even trying. And Rumsfeld going on about "going to war with the army you have..."
What about Afghanistan? Finding bin Laden was hard...let's have another war!
I too was dumb enough to believe Powell. In fact, I thought we were ill prepared to face a poison gas attack and would suffer great losses. When nothing like that happened I realized I had been suckered.
The thing about Powell was that his speech to the UN was utter garbage.
Powell's best evidence was pictures of trucks leaving a building. It was proof they didn't have any real evidence. At best, the Bush white house didn't know and didn't care.
Kevin is also leaving out an important fact about public opinion. Most Americans opposed going to war without UN approval. The UN did not give approval partly because Powell stank up the room so much.
Every major US media outlet that I'm aware of praised Powell's speech. They told America it was an open and shut case.
Rumsfeld could maintain his high opinion of himself because no one in the press/media wanted to explain why they lionized him when he was riding high on the wave of post 9/11 "Let's kill some Ay-Rabs!"hysteria. And neither do the majority of Americans.
It's the same with George W Bush. The press/media was comparing that transparent fraud to Winston Churchill! You think they want to admit they not only fell for the bullshit, but worked feverishly to promote it?
Of course the Iraq invasion was popular in 2003, when the Bush administration was lying about WMD and the MSM, such as the "liberal" NY Times, were backing them up. But in the real world their claims were found to false - there was no evidence of WMD at any time. The question is why the Bush gang mostly retains their reputations after causing hundreds of thousands of deaths with their lying. Why are they still respected, especially among people who call themselves liberals, or at least not partisan Republicans, such as the writers in the MSM.
Because most people don't think they were lying. It's mainly just the people that hated Bush and his administration in the first place that think they were lying.
But they were actually lying. There were no WMD and evidence that there was was slim at best. I was amongst those liberals who supported the war at first, based on the lies. I sure feel dumb now.
2015=
"In a Public Mind poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University released Wednesday, more than half of Republicans — 51 percent — and half of those who watch Fox News — 52 percent — say that they believe it to be “definitely true” or “probably true” that American forces found an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq.
Thirty-two percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, 41 percent of people who reported to watch CNN and 14 percent of MSNBC viewers answered similarly.
Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was later found that Iraq did have individual stockpiles of chemical weapons, but there was no active WMD program in the country."
Wa too high for a lie. but still not most.
Hansen Blix Did Nothing Wrong.
So, you're saying that people who supported the Bush administration are too stupid to know they were lied to? Or are you going to claim there actually were WMD in Iraq?
Yet another study demonstrates that conservatives are more likely to believe false news, and consequently are more likely to be targeted by it,
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/02/health/conservatives-false-news-study/index.html
and, to a smaller extent, are less likely to believe real news.
St Peter to Donny as he approached the pearly gates of Heaven “Sorry Donny you go the grave with the soul you have not the soul you wish you had…,good luck in the hell you helped create…”
I don't think this is the whole explanation. After all this popularities faded after it turned out that the Irak War was not only started with no proper reason but also conduct with no proper strategy and with disastrously stupid tactics.
I believe the reason for Rumsfeld's good standing in "polite" society has to do with the fact that he was a Republican. It just is an awful lot easier to get away with screw ups for Republicans than for Democrats.
Me and mine thought it was frickin' obvious that the Administration was lying about the presence WMD and/or Iraq's nuclear program. Why? Because it was well-known that Bush & co. wanted a war. Because despite the fact that they desperately wanted one, the best physical evidence were the aluminum tubes that weren't centrifuge parts, the laughable 'yellowcake' forgeries, the bacteriological trailers that were anything but, etc. If this was the best the administration could come up with of proof that was not of the he-said and trust-me type, then pretty clearly, there was no there 'there'.
This was not understood to be particularly a convoluted chain of reasoning. Not then, and I hope, not now.
Right. It was obvious to anyone who thought about it they had no evidence. You didn't have to be a Bush hater or a peacenik to see that.
Missing from the post is this (from Wikipedia)
Drum supported the 2003 Iraq War in its early stages, but just before the United States launched its attack, he changed his mind. He said, "Before the war started I switched to opposition on practical grounds (i.e., that George W. Bush's approach was incapable of accomplishing the goals it was meant to accomplish).
I wonder how that torture graph would look if separated on gender. Men have a bent for getting things by force majeure, women less so. Danziger, the talented leftie political toonist, was, IIRC, an interrogator in Vietnam and didn't use torture, just made friends....and got everything that was needed.
It's an attractive 🙁 delusion that we can get what we want, think we need, by the application of force. Jesus weeps.