Rumsfeld: Evil, lying bastard.

The Village Voice: Nation: James Ridgeway's War Log: Rumsfeld's Dealings With Saddam Researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies have been combing documents from the period, and they recently discovered Rumsfeld was errand boy, and perhaps participant, in a behind-the-scenes oil deal which would make Perle, in his current predicament, look like a piker.

It worked like this: George Schultz was Reagan's secretary of state. Reagan had recruited him from the uppermost ranks of the Bechtel Corp, the huge international engineering and construction company. The documents suggest that behind the scenes Schultz was pushing an oil pipeline from Iraq across Jordan to the port of Aqaba. Bechtel would construct it. According to IPS, documents show that Schultz prepped Rumsfeld for his meetings with Saddam. At the time, Saddam was gassing the Kurds, and if the U.S. were to come down against him on that score, then the pipeline most certainly would go down the drain. Beginning with Rumsfeld, Reagan top officials hoping to make the deal kissed Saddam's ass, sidestepping the poison-gas issue, and snuggling up with the man they now say is a vile dictator. In the end, Saddam turned down the pipeline.

From then on, the U.S. government primly rewrote the history of our earlier dealings with Saddam so much that Rumsfeld and the other Bush cronies can say this second Persian Gulf war has nothing to do with oil. They say it is meant solely to remove the dictator and save the Iraqi people from the horrors of weapons of mass destruction, gas being the main one, even though the U.S. never cared about poison gas when it stoop to make money off an oil pipeline. And guess what? Bechtel is one of the few companies asked to play a key role in the reconstruction of Iraq after the war.