The man who ostensibly thought he could transform Iraq into a shining democracy with “shock and awe” bombing and a few special forces troops died at the age of 88 on June 30. Rumsfeld’s six-and-a-half years as Secretary of Defense under GW Bush were nothing short of a disaster. He “transformed” the military into a force capable of failing at two wars at the same time, wars that he helped lie the U.S. into and that he bequeathed to his successors. In the process he morphed the “global war on terrorism” into “the long war,” which Donald Trump accurately denounced as “the forever wars.” In February of 2006, Lyndon LaRouche ridiculed Rumsfeld’s long war as a fraud. “Long war,” LaRouche said, is not any new theory; it’s imperialism. It’s perpetual war, as practiced by the Roman Empire, through the deployment of its legions, to destroy the ability of its subject populations to resist, even to resist chaos. It means the continual starting of wars, including by means of “Get him to fight him,” by which the empire manages its subject populations with warfare.
This is no special theory of a new kind of war, or high-tech war, LaRouche continued. “That’s horseshit; in an era when we don’t even have horse cavalry any more, they’re selling horseshit.” This is old Roman imperial fascism; the war theory of Nazi fascism.
