Simply the Worst

Donald Rumsfeld is starting to make Robert McNamara look good.

At least McNamara felt sorry at the end for all those lives and limbs lost because of his colossal misjudgments and cretinous refusal to admit mistakes.

“We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose,” a penitent McNamara said.

By contrast, when Diane Sawyer asked Rumsfeld last week if he ever revisited decisions that cost lives, he blandly replied, “Well, you know, in a war, many things cost lives.”

Goodness, gracious, stuff happens.

As a Republican congressman in the Johnson era and a Nixon White House official, Rummy had a front-row seat to the ego-driven bungling on Vietnam. But unlike McNamara, who said that the U.S. repeated Vietnam’s moral, political, economic and cultural mistakes in Iraq, Rumsfeld is still blinded by ego.

As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award. Only another person with such an ironic spin on the phrase “Defender of the Constitution” could present the award, of course, so Dick Cheney popped by to give it to his old pal.

Cheney’s entrance music was Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” also favored by Ricky Gervais for motivational speeches in the British version of “The Office.” When supporters of Ron and Rand Paul heckled the crusty pair — yelling “draft dodger” at Cheney, “Where’s bin Laden?” at Rumsfeld, and “war criminal” at both — Cheney blithely ordered them to “Sit down and shut up.”

Noting that his friend was both the youngest and oldest defense secretary, Cheney said, “Maybe if we give him a third term he’ll get it right.”

Doubtful. Rummy was still full of vinegar as he taunted President Obama for the conservatives.

Looking at the administration’s many “reversals of their announced policies on national security issues — Guantánamo Bay, military commissions, indefinite detention, CIA drone strikes,” he said, it makes me wonder if Dick has had more influence on President Obama than the people that got him elected.”

He is still oblivious about how wrong it was to shunt aside Afghanistan and goose up reasons to go careering into Iraq, which he felt had easier-to-hit targets and easier-to-find villains. He doesn’t agree with the “If you break it, you own it” theory. He thinks you can break it and just leave and not get bogged down in trying to build democratic dream countries.

Rummy’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed “anticipatory self-defense.”

At “Rumsfeld.com,” the author has put up an archive of records and memos. One, marked “SECRET” and declassified last month at his request, is dated Sept. 9, 2002. That was after his P.R. roll-out to the March 2003 Iraq invasion was under way.

The subject line reads “WMD.” Secretary Rumsfeld is sending a secret report that he received a few days earlier to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asking: “Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD. It is big.”

The attachment is from Major Gen. Glen Shaffer, then the director for intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense, responding to Rummy’s request to know the “unknowns” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

“We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program,” Shaffer wrote. Unfortunately, the 0% had to do with actual weapons.

“Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence,” the report said. “The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.”

It added: “We don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.” And continued: “We do not know if they have purchased, or attempted to purchase, a nuclear weapon. We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear weapon-related facilities. Our knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program is based largely — perhaps 90% — on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

On biological weapons: “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons,” the report said, adding: “We believe Iraq has 7 mobile BW agent production plants but cannot locate them ... our knowledge of how and where they are produced is probably up to 90% incomplete.”

On chemical weapons: “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce final chemical agent.” And on ballistic missile programs they had “little missile-specific data.”

Somehow that was twisted into “a slam-dunk.” You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want.