I only digested a few.

I, too, used to think "so what?"

One difference between the Rumsfeld/Hussein handshake, and the Chamberlain/Hitler handshake is that Chamberlain was seeking peace, plain and simple. He wasn't trying to buy time to re-arm, he wasn't playing some sort of vicious chessgame. He just wanted to keep Europe from bleeding to death.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, was apparently seeking ways to use Iraq: to use it against Iran, and to use it to secure US interests in the region (oil). The fact that Iraq was waging chemical warfare allegedly on a fairly grand scale--and the US had a policy denouncing the use of such weapons--wasn't going to stop us from getting chummy with Iraq in order to get our foot in the door.

Rummy's famous handshake stands as a symbol of the divide between our fondness for talking about principles on the one hand, and our unwillingness to live by them on the other.