RUMSFELD, THE DEFINITIVE PORTRAIT Roger Morris's must-read slice-and-dice

As the country is finally being treated to a long-delayed, full-scale Congressional debate about Iraq, it is more important than ever to understand how we got to where we are, how we became mired in a bloody quagmire in which we had no business engaging, and how the country and the Congress were drugged by lies and dragged into an illegal war.

No man bears greater responsibility for the tragedy of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld (left)-- yet, though his face and voice are, unfortunately, all too familiar even to the most casual news consumer, most of us have only a rather sanitized conception of who Rumsfeld is, the crucial role he has played at key moments of American history for the last three decades, and what drives him.

Roger Morris (right) has now filled the voids in our understanding of Rumsfeld with a brilliant, lengthy essay that lifts the carpet to reveal Rumsfeld's rise and role, and how he led us into an iniquitous war. Roger is one of our finest chroniclers of contemporary history, a  masterful dissector of American politics, and a skilled portraitist of the dark side of American power. As a young man with a Ph.D from Harvard, he was a Foreign Service officer and a member of the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Roger Morris resigned from the NSC in protest against the secret invasion of Cambodia in 1970 -- an experience which radicalized him. Since then, he has turned out a series of important, probing books that have contributed mightily to our understanding of our times. His superb, monumental, 1000-page book on Richard Nixon, which won a National Book Award, gave us a fresh understanding of a diabolical president about whom we thought we already knew everything. Roger's razor-sharp books on Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig were equally revealing dissections. And his book on Bill and Hillary -- Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America -- is still the best single book ever written on the duo who led the Democratic Party's turn to the right (and if you want to understand who Hillary really is, if you haven't yet read this book, you owe it to yourself to do so.) Roger's newest book, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published later this year by Knopf.

A couple of weeks ago, Roger sent me the manuscript of his Rumsfeld essay because he was having trouble placing such a long piece, and wanted to get it out to the public quickly in time to have some impact on the national debate about the Iraq war. The death of long-form journalism in this country is one of the great disasters which have befallen my profession, and has sharply reduced the number of outlets for a piece the length of Roger's Rumsfeld slice-and-dice, no matter how brilliant a read it is. But I knew one man who'd "get it" and who had the capacity to put it rapidly before a wide readership of serious people -- my old friend Tom Engelhardt (right), who runs the  indispensable on-line TomDispatch, a project of The Nation Institute, which regularly publishes essay-length contributions from a distinguished roster of writers and journalists on the most nefarious aspects of the American imperium. As a longtime senior editor at Pantheon books (before that distinguished progressive publishing house was swallowed up and denatured by a conglomerate), Tom published some of the most important left books to appear over two decades. On TomDispatch he has displayed the same discernment in sussing out important but under-reported foreign and defense policy issues and finding writers who can sound the toxin on them with expertise and style. When I sent Roger's Rumsfeld essay to Tom, as soon as he read it he was so excited by it he couldn't wait to publish it, despite its length.

Roger Morris's brilliant Rumsfeld dissection -- with the telling title "The Undertaker's Tally" -- is being published by TomDispatch in two parts, the first of which has just appeared. With acerbic brio, in this first installment Morris traces in damning detail the ascension of Rumsfeld -- a young Michigan Congressman whose "rightist mentality, New Deal-phobic corporatist cant and Cold War chauvinism came dressed more in modish vigor than telltale substance" -- and who engineered the selection of Gerald Ford as House Republican leader, thus enabling Ford's later presidency; Rumsfeld's appointment by Nixon to head the LBJ-created Office of Economic Opportunity and "abort [its] unwanted embryonic empowerment of the poor; Rumsfeld's sponsorship of the rise of his protégé, a "young Wyoming reactionary named Dick Cheney," who became Rummy's partner in crime along with an equally reactionary future Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci; the Rumsfeld-Chency coup that dumped Kissinger from his National Security Council job and replaced him with Brent Scowcroft, who later helped cement the relationship between George W. Bush and Rumsfeld, as did another Rumsfeld crony, James Baker; Rumsfeld's first tenure as post-Vietnam Defense Secretary, where he perfected the high-handed, dissent-squelching, fact-manipulating practices that later he used to get us into Iraq; and a lot more.

You can -- and should -- read the first part of Roger Morris's dissection of Rumsfeld by clicking here. In publishing this essay, Tom Engelhardt emphasized that, "If you don't understand Rumsfeld, you can't fully grasp the unprecedented ruin which is American foreign policy today. It's not something I often say, but this is simply a must-read." Tom is ever so right, on both counts. And don't miss the next half of Morris's dismemberment of Rumsfeld, which will be published on TomDispatch tonight.

MORE RECOMMENDED READING: In his latest column  for "InsideHigherEd.com," Scott McLemee has a long interview with Danny Postel  (right) about why the left should take back the Iran issue from the neo-cons. Danny, author of the excellent, recently-published book Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism (University of Chicago Press), explains: "What is now blindingly clear to the naked eye, for anyone who cares to look, is that the neocon agenda vis-a-vis Iran has never been about democracy or human rights. What the neocons want in Tehran is a pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli regime; whether it’s a democratic one or not is an entirely secondary matter to them. And Iranian dissidents know this, which is why they want nothing to do with the neocons....This is not only a critique of the neocons, though; it’s also a challenge to those on the Left who have bought into the neocons’ Big Lie about being the bosom buddies of Iran’s dissidents. Due to intellectual laziness, a preference for moral simplicity, existential bad faith, or some combination thereof, lots of leftists have opted out of even expressing moral support, let alone standing in active solidarity with, Iranian dissidents, often on the specious grounds that the latter are on the CIA’s payroll or are cozy with the neocons. Utter and complete tripe. Perhaps, as I say, understandable in the past, when it wasn’t as transparent what empty hogwash the neocons’ posturing was. But now that the neocons’ real cards are on the table and their pretense of solidarity with Iranian dissidents has been shattered, the Left can no longer use the neocons as an avoidance mechanism...." You should read the rest of Danny Postel's analysis by clicking here......Also on Iran, in today's Los Angeles Times there's a good op-ed by Azar Nafisi (left), the distinguished author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran." She writes, "who would benefit from a military attack on Iran? Not the workers, students, minorities, women or the dissenters who have been trying to find nonviolent and democratic ways of resisting and changing the present system. Such an attack would provide an excuse for the most reactionary and violent elements within the ruling elite to stifle any voice of dissent not just from within the civil society, but from the divided and factional ruling elite. It would help rally factions within that elite behind Ahmadinejad...In other words, the main beneficiary of an attack on Iran would be the most militaristic and reactionary elements in the Iranian ruling hierarchy." You can read Nafisi's entire article by clicking here.

ARAB BLOGGERS: Bitter Lemons International Org., the online Middle East roundtable, has an interesting symposium this week on "The Arab Blogosphere" by four Arab bloggers from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain -- and you can read it by clicking here.