Rumsfeld’s Swan Song: A Perfect Epitaph

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The New York Times’ release of Rumsfeld’s last policy directive, issued a day before he was fired last week, serves as a perfect epitaph for the failure of the NeoCon ideology, which Rumsfeld never shared but always supported. 

  In his last “snowflake,” designed to filter down from on high to the troops, Rumsfeld carefully listed an array of useless military options as high priority and listed the non-military options as useless or worse.  Most notably, he listed decentralization of political power through federalism in Iraq as the worst of all bad options. 

  He did not even list the decentralization of economic power by privatizing oil ownership through equal shares of inalienable and voting stock to every resident of the Fertile Crescent, so that every Shia, Kurd, and Sunni would share equally in both the control and the profits of all the oil there. 

  This failure to envisage peace through justice as a better paradigm than stability through power is one reason why colonial “nation-building” traditionally has produced both injustice and chaos.

  Since the NeoCon mantra has always been one country / one nation in the fictitious “nation” of Iraq, the resulting chaos is now described as civil war, rather than as the chaotic result of three national liberation movements striving for autonomy or independence from centralized power. 

  The American goal of harnessing oil assets in the Middle East through a strategy of peace through centralizing power has accelerated the wealth gaps within every country.  The inevitable acceleration of this injustice, instigated by the U.S. failure to tie economic democratization to political democratization, means that the only U.S. solution to chaos must be the imposition of dictatorial regimes favorable to their American benefactors. 

  This suicidal strategy inevitably must alienate both the poor and those who once looked to America as the last best hope for a world order based on compassionate justice. 

  The most extreme case of injustice in every sense of the word is America’s support for the ghettoization of the Holy Land.  This is why U.S. support for real democracy through the hudna initiative of the Hamas government, based on the common Abrahamic framework of love, courage, and peace through the compassionate justice of an eventual Abraham Federation, could and should provide a model for the rest of the world.

  Unfortunately the secular liberals in all the world religions see only man-made solutions of governmental power and private charity, both of which fail to address the causes of terrorism.  The reactionary conservatives see no solutions other than their own global hegemony to stave off what they rightly fear as the inevitable dissolution of global civilization.  Both the liberals and conservatives, who constitute the powerful of the world, are caught within a bankrupt paradigm of unreality. 

  The only hope for the long-range global future may lie with the powerless, as it always has in human history, and with the common wisdom that survives within the enlightened orthodox or “traditionalist” communities of the major world religions.