What It’s Like to Work for Donald Rumsfeld, from Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic

This image is a message (probably an email) that Rumsfeld sent to then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith on April 7, 2003.  You can read it in all its 56-word glory.  Here’s the text of the memo:

TO: Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Issues w/various countries

We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast.  If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.

We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.

And Korea doesn’t seem to be going so well.

Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?

Thanks.

Really.  That’s it.  Now, I’ve experienced the phenomenon of working with such large amounts of money that it ceased to have any real meaning for me.  It became an academic exercise, far divorced from finding every last penny in my own beleaguered checking account.

But this?  How can one ever become so jaded and cynical that one writes off entire nations, countries filled with people just like you, as “a problem.”  The Pakistan problem?!?  How can that not be completely, one-hundred-percent offensive?  How can any person fail to be disgusted by this.

Then, almost as an afterthought, North Korea doesn’t seem to be going well.  How does a nation of nearly 24 million individual men, women, and children get so casually dismissed like this?

It doesn’t matter one iota that I disagree with the politics of Mr. Rumsfeld.  It doesn’t matter which presidents he served under.  If Mr. Gates or Mr. Aspin or Mr. McNamara said something this… this… inhuman, I’d be shouting just as loud.

Mister Donald Rumsfeld, Undercover Nun is praying for your immortal soul.

(Source: rumsfeld.com)