I do wish people would stop throwing around that term "politically correct" as if it meant something and somehow solved an argument. In this particular context, Doug, it seems a totally irrelevant adjective.

Rumsfeld's remarks were politically insensitive but that's a different thing entirely from whatever "politically incorrect" might be supposed to mean.

At least when Clinton came over last autumn speaking to the Labour Party conference he had the grace to admit that the USA (and the UK) had done much to help Saddam in the past, and in fact he saw this as a reason why it had a responsibility to undo some of the resulting harm:

The West has a lot to answer for in Iraq. Before the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds and the Iranians there was hardly a peep in the West because he was in Iran. Evidence has now come to light that in the early 1980s the United States may have even supplied him with the materials necessary to start the bio-weapons programme. And in the Gulf War the Shi'ites in the South East of Iraq were urged to rise up and then were cruelly abandoned to their fate as he came in and killed large numbers of them, drained the Marshes and largely destroyed their culture and way of life. We cannot walk away from them or the proved evidence that they are capable of self-government and entitled to a decent life. We do not necessarily have to go to war to give it to them, but we cannot forget that we are not blameless in the misery under which they suffer and we must continue to support them.

Tha is not a tone we've been hearing from Rumsfeld, who was heavily involved personally in that process. Or from his boss.