Victory Will Come as in Cold War, Rumsfeld Predicts
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WASHINGTON — President Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, says the military alone cannot win the war against global jihad.
In a phone interview on Saturday with The New York Sun, Mr. Rumsfeld said the current war is similar to the Cold War, and that America’s victory depends on assisting moderate Muslims against extremists and on reforming the domestic and international institutions forged after World War II.
“The concept of victory in this struggle will not be a signing ceremony aboard a ship like the USS Missouri. It will be much more like the Cold War, where, over time, the struggle that is taking place between violent extremists who want to impose their will on the rest of the world, re-establish a caliphate, and require others to live lives that fit their idea of how lives ought to be lived … that they lose and the moderates who do not want to impose their will on other people, the people who do not want to murder people, cutting off their heads and blowing people up, that struggle will result in the extremists being reduced in numbers and opportunity and support and the people who oppose extremists growing in numbers and being successful in defeating them,” he said.
Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld described victory as a moment when Americans feel safe. Throughout the Bush administration, the concept of victory has evolved from rolling up networks for Al Qaeda and other terrorists and depriving them of safe havens to the outcome in a battle within Islam between those Muslims who seek war with the West and those who don’t. When asked to elaborate Saturday, Mr. Rumsfeld said America’s task primarily was “to help those people opposing the extremists, to put pressure on the extremists.” But he made sure to say, “The idea that you can ignore these enemies or live and let live or find some accommodation of peaceful existence or detente is just erroneous, it can’t be done.”
Some of these thoughts have been sketched out in internal memos from Mr. Rumsfeld made public last month by the Washington Post. Since resigning from the Bush administration following the Democratic takeover of the House and Senate in November 2006, Mr. Rumsfeld has kept a low profile. In recent books about the Bush administration, he is portrayed as a stubborn cold warrior and hardliner. Among Democrats he has come under special criticism for approving the first round of interrogation procedures for terrorist detainees, procedures that have since been modified. A group of former generals in 2006 began calling for his resignation on the grounds that the war in Iraq was breaking the Army. Even some voices on the right, from outlets like the Weekly Standard, have called for his resignation out of frustration that he sent too few troops to Iraq.
But Mr. Rumsfeld still has his admirers. On Saturday he delivered the keynote address to the annual Claremont Institute dinner in honor of Winston Churchill. He was the recipient of the institute’s 2007 award for statesmanship.
His address Saturday focused on how he saw an agile enemy utilizing asymmetric warfare against a lumbering superpower in America. “Their decentralized networks have been able to effectively employ the tools of the Information Age, while the U.S. government remains ponderous, muscle-bound, and unable to respond in real time to the deceits of these enemies,” he said.
The theme is a familiar one for close watchers of Mr. Rumsfeld. USA Today published a 2003 “snowflake” memo from the former defense secretary complaining that America lacked the metrics to measure success or failure in the war on terror, and complaining that attacks from terrorist groups were far less costly than the measures the country should take to stop them.
In the interview on Saturday, Mr. Rumsfeld expanded on this idea. He noted that the budget process for the defense department typically took three years from the authorization to the appropriation and finally the spending of money for programs to combat the enemy. Another example of the new challenge is the predicament in Pakistan. “If you have enemies in countries you are not at war with, how does one fight against an enemy in a country you are not at war with?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked. He answered the question himself and said it was important to work with the Pakistani government to fight Al Qaeda in the federally administered tribal areas on the Afghan border. He did not, however, venture an opinion on whether his old boss, Mr. Bush, should pressure General Musharraf to step down from the presidency in Islamabad.
He also sounded support for a plan favored this election cycle by Mayor Giuliani, that NATO could possibly be expanded to meet security threats that the United Nations was not up to meeting. “A global alliance of free and responsible nations could better focus collective action against the growing threats to the nation-state system,” he said in his speech.
Mr. Rumsfeld said he is not advising any Republican candidates for this election cycle. He is in the process now of establishing a new foundation to fund fellowships in foreign policy, micro-enterprise projects in the third world and bringing journalists and political leaders from Central Asia and the former Soviet Union to meet their American counterparts.