Donald Rumsfeld's regret over Iraq? Trying to 'fashion a democracy' there

At long last, Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has found something he regrets in the way the U.S. war against Iraq was sold and executed. Not the bit about weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, or the entirely fictional ties to al Qaeda and 9/11, or Shock and Awe, or the insistence that the war would pay for itself, or the use of mercenary forces, or the bizarre fixation with outsourcing various other parts of the U.S. military response, or the shortchanging of the Afghanistan mission in favor of a war the Bush administration's top officials could get more excited about.

No, the part that he doesn't like is the bit where we tried to convert them to democracy afterwards.

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories. The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

Rumsfeld, of course, has never been one to worry about whether a prospective American ally was a democracy or dictatorship; that much-passed-around picture of the smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with the murderous chemical weapons-using Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, back when Hussein was an important United States ally, makes the point rather succinctly. Given that breaking the nation up into sectarian sections was never in the cards, we can only read this as a Rumsfeldian wish that we had simply installed a different strongman as Iraqi head of state and been done with it.

He does, however, continue his long tradition of being gloriously oblivious.

He warned that Arab nations are disintegrating, and said that the West’s airstrikes in Libya had served to further destabilize the region.

Yes, that is what "destabilized" the region. Airstrikes in Libya. Sharp as a tack, he is.