The Toronto Star: "A Letter to Rummy"

See? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has so much gravitas - or is it animal magnetism? - that even Canadians are writing to him! From Eric Margolis in Sunday's Toronto Star:

Dear Rummy: In your speech to the American Legion in Salt Lake City last week, you compared critics of your wars abroad to appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Allow me to disagree, Mr. Secretary.

I’m also a member of American Legion — Post 7, Toronto — and I don’t agree with all those well-meaning but insular vets who cheered you in Utah. What most of them know about Iraq or Afghanistan wouldn’t fill a golf ball.

So you may hornswoggle these good souls by claiming the administration is re-fighting World War II against “Islamo-facists,” i.e., reborn Nazis disguised as wicked Muslims.

What ever would we do without those all-purpose Nazis?

I hear you called Saddam Hussein a Nazi. Excuse me, were you not the Reagan Administration official who went to Baghdad in 1983 to offer Saddam military, financial and intelligence support in his war of aggression against Iran? Time for your memory pills, Rummy.

I opposed keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan, fearing, as has happened, that they’d get stuck in a no-win guerilla war. Before you invaded Iraq, I wrote Saddam had no WMDs, and predicted the U.S. would face guerilla and civil war, and a financial debacle, not flowers. Today, I say get out of these lost wars before another American soldier dies.

I guess that makes me a 1930s-style “appeaser” and a leftie. A neocon mama’s boy from Canada, whose closest brush with combat was a dinnertime spat between his parents, even had the chutzpah to call me “unpatriotic” in a U.S. magazine article for opposing the Iraq war.

Next to my desk, I have a large framed Certificate of Recognition bearing the great eagle seal of the United States, attesting to my service to the nation during the Cold War. “We the people of this nation are forever grateful,” it says.

It’s signed by you, Mr Secretary.

Read the rest here.