The Observer, October 19, 2007
Volume XL, Issue 8
To Donald Rumsfeld at Stanford U.
Dear Mr. Rumsfeld,
Please don't be embarrassed. Who hasn't taken a wrong turn, gotten lost, and failed to ask for directions?
I've recently learned that you've gotten a bit turned around and are traveling in the completely wrong direction. Why play the blame game? The fault could lie with the staff at Dulles International, or perhaps it's pilot error. You fly with the airline you have, not with the airline you want.
You see, I've heard that you are heading west, in the direction of my alma mater, Stanford University. The conservative think tank housed at Stanford, the Hoover Institution, is under the impression that you've agreed to be a fellow there. And I know that, as an admirer of Winston Churchill, Stanford cannot be your intended destination.
You've quoted Churchill any number of times: at NATO meetings, in speeches before soldier-backdrops, and at your retirement from office. In 2002 you compared yourself to a prescient Churchill of the 1930s, a lonely voice warning of the imminent threat from Iraq just like Churchill warned of the gathering storm over Germany. You've called your opponents simpering Neville Chamberlains as you've equated yourself with the Last Lion.
That's why I know you mean to head east, not west.
As you must know, your double Sir Winston was in charge of the Royal Navy at the beginning of WWI. And you know that in 1915 Churchill came up with a brilliant plan to invade enemy Turkey by making a beach landing in the Dardanelles. Let's just say that the British were not greeted as liberators. This operation cost over 21,000 British lives alone. It was so disastrous that it rose to the level of having a one-word moniker; does "Gallipoli" ring a bell?
After this not-so-successful "surge," Churchill did not retire to an office with views of California's golden hillsides. Rather, within the year he headed to war-torn Europe to lead a battalion of infantry in the trenches. For six months he lived in the mud and peered over the barbed wire watching for German movement.
Well, I'm not sure that they have trenches in Iraq, but I bet they can find room for you manning a wall in the besieged Green Zone or escorting a vulnerable convoy. What an opportunity to prove, yet again, that you are following in the footsteps of your counterpart!
Fear not, if the good people at San Francisco International can't arrange a flight back east – way east – I'm sure that any number of Stanford students, staff, or faculty will be willing to drive you to a recruiting station and the United States Army can make the appropriate arrangements.
Yours truly,
John Broich
John Broich received his Ph.D. in modern British history from Stanford in 2005. He is Case Western Reserve University's new British historian. Join him for an introductory-level lecture on modern Britain and its empire or an upper-level seminar on the origins of the British Empire this spring.
