If you are someone who cares about such things, you probably already know that Donald Rumsfeld’s new memoir, “Known and Unknown,” has created some controversy thanks to the former defense secretary’s expectedly self-serving justification of the Iraq war. The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward, who wrote several behind-the-scenes books about the Bush administration, took particular exception to Rumsfeld’s version of events and wrote about the subject here.

In addition to the financial cost and the loss of lives, our country’s reputation was tarnished on the world stage thanks to Rumsfeld and company’s unnecessary war. Consider that context as you read the following quote from NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel in a report on the protests in Libya.

“People here have been told by Gadhafi that the United States wants to invade and make Libya into another Iraq. They seem to believe it,” Engel said while in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.

I wish President Obama’s detractors would keep that in mind when they criticize him for allegedly “apologizing for America.” That’s not exactly what Obama has done; he essentially has said that the reckless line of thinking that led to the Iraq war was not the way America normally conducts itself on the world stage. Perhaps Obama’s critics will accept this fact someday, though I am not hopeful on that front; regardless, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration who led our country into the Iraq war need to accept that they were wrong to do so.