Donald Rumsfeld says Obama is perceived internationally as 'weak'

Just zip it, will ya? Of course not.
(Caricature by DonkeyHotey) In a sane world, Donald Rumsfeld would never show his face in public again. In a truly sane world, he'd have long ago stood in the dock at The Hague and would now be confined to a spartan cell along with some of his former colleagues.

But. No.

Instead, the former Secretary of Defense is still giving interviews. Not only treated respectfully but also questioned as if a guy determined to turn the Middle East into a U.S. vassal no matter how many people were tortured and killed to achieve it actually has some special understanding to impart. This time, it's about President Obama. In a Wednesday interview:

Rumsfeld mentioned Iran, North Korea and terrorist networks as threats to the U.S. "But the thing that worries me the most is not any one of those things specifically, it is the risk, the danger that the United States will increasingly be seen as weak," he said.

Fox host Sean Hannity asked: 'Do you think the rest of the world views him as weak?'

'I do,' Rumsfeld said, adding later that, 'He doesn't seem to feel that the United States has and should continue to be playing an important role in the world in contributing to peace and stability.'

Peace and stability. That is something Mr. known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns knows quite a lot about. This is, after all, the guy who was talking about attacking Iraq years before the World Trade Center towers had fallen into the streets of Lower Manhattan and by the afternoon of Sept. 11 looking for any scrap of evidence to connect Saddam Hussein to that attack. This is the guy who asserted:

We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat ...

And:

"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons'including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. ... His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons'including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox."

This is the guy who told the press in the summer of 2003 that there were no Iraqi insurgents and reporters should stop saying there were. The guy who supervised the military's planning for extreme interrogation methods outlawed by the army field manual and the Geneva Conventions. Who personally signed off on specific methods of torture and encouraged field commanders to come up with new ones. The guy whose orders, backed up by contentious legal memorandums, led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, whose revelation helped oh-so-much with peace and stability. Whose plans for the Iraq invasion ignored the advice of generals and civilian experts. Who had no plans for the aftermath except to roll in the flower petals the Iraqis would strew in the path of U.S. forces.

Whatever deep flaws President Obama's foreign policy contains, Donald Rumsfeld isn't fit to shine his shoes, much less offer advice or critiques.

He doesn't save those critiques for interviews. On May 1, he tweeted a complaint about what the president was saying on the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, noting that "The special operators who have every right to 'spike the football' are too professional to do so. The White House might follow their lead."

This from the guy whose boss was, exactly nine years previously, prancing around the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln with an adolescent grin and a codpiece pretending to be a fighter pilot, "spiking the football" to commemorate the supposed end of a war that would see the deaths of thousands more American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

A decade and a half ago, one of Rumsfeld's fellow neo-conservatives, William J. Bennett, wrote a book about virtues in which he suggested that America was in dire need of a return to the concept of shame. That people who do disgraceful things should admit their faults and hang their heads low. Donald Rumsfeld will not, of course, ever ever ever follow that advice. In his mind, only weaklings listen.

We could tell him to shut the hell up. But that would be a waste of breath.