A Cold Warrior dies

Another part of Reagan's brain is gone


June 2004: Not much challenge from Maine Public Television

Caspar Weinberger died today in Bangor, Maine. I'm already a little late to get ahead of the hagiography. But rest assured, no punches will get pulled here. ``Cap the Knife'' was a Cold War, Reagan-era figure I truly despised.

Back in June 2004, Maine Public TV ran an interview with Caspar Weinberger at his fine home along Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island. For the most part, the former Secretary of Defense was allowed to rattle off without balance mythological Reaganisms like ``we had very little military strength'' in the early 1980s as the Republican administration began its reign.

On Saddam Hussein, Weinberger declared in the 2004 interview (hilariously, in my view) that you ``can't deal with people like that, you can't negotiate with liars.'' Of course, one of Weinberger's major Pentagon foreign policy projects in the 1980s was the vigorous armament of Saddam Hussein. The effort included removal of Iraq from the terror-sponsor list and the offerings of envoy Donald Rumsfeld during more than one friendly visit to the palaces in Baghdad.

On war, Weinberger spoke gibberish about Vietnam and Iraq, ``Vietnam was the only war we ever entered that we did not intend to win. We were quite content with a containment philosophy. We did win [in Iraq]. Now you've got the aftermath, which is made up of 1500, maybe 2800 supporters of the old Baathist regime, and they have weapons, and they have ammunition dumps that we're slowly eliminating."

And on torture, he parroted the rotten apple theory, ``The real problem of course is that there were somewhere between six to a dozen extremely rotten apples and they are poisoning and tarnishing the whole barrel. Bear in mind that this is about that ratio, six to ten people committing terrible acts with 135,000 people who aren't.''

I managed to get through about half of the analysis of his remarks that I wanted to do in this post from June 2004.

For the larger picture about Weinberger's relationship to the arming of Saddam and the Iran-Contra affair, the 1992 New Yorker article by Murry Waas and Craig Unger is useful, ```Many of us thought it would be better if Iraq won,' Weinberger has told the Los Angeles Times in an interview,'' said Weinberger in reference to the Iran-Iraq war.

More recently, in the fall of 2003, Weinberger was slated to be the featured speaker at the now-infamous Doing Business in Iraq conference sponsored by the University of Maine. We organized vigorously to draw out the issues of war profiteering the conference represented. It was indefinitely postponed shortly before it was to occur. The conference was a perfect metaphor for Weinberger's career--an effort by capitalists to divvy up the spoils of war.

Caspar's Cold War ghost, consisting of the nuclear arsenal he hysterically promoted while alive will haunt the world for decades to come. Rest in peace, Caspar Weinberger.