Transterrestrial Musings

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Vintage Rumsfeld

Can be found here.

...In North Africa, Libya?s leader decided in December to disclose and eliminate his country?s chemical, biological and nuclear weapon programs, as well as his ballistic missiles. In the weeks since, Libya has turned over equipment and documents relating to nuclear and missile programs -- including long-range ballistic missile guidance sets and centrifuge parts for uranium enrichment -- and has begun the destruction of its unfilled chemical munitions. With these important steps, Libya has acted and announced to the world that they want to disarm and to prove they are doing so.
Compare Libya?s recent behavior to the behavior of the Iraqi regime. Saddam Hussein could have opened up his country to the world -- just as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and South Africa had done -- and as Libya is doing today.

Instead, he chose the path of deception and defiance. He gave up tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues under the U.N. sanctions, when he could have had those sanctions lifted simply by demonstrating that he had disarmed. He passed up the ?final opportunity? that was given to him in the UN Resolution 1441 to prove that his programs were ended and his weapons were destroyed.

Even after the statues of Saddam Hussein were falling in Baghdad, the Iraqi regime continued to hide and destroy evidence systematically going through ministries destroying what they could get their hands on.

We may never know why Saddam Hussein chose the destruction of his regime over peaceful disarmament. But we know this: it was his choice. And if he had chosen differently -- if the Iraqi regime had taken the steps Libya is now taking -- there would have been no war...

...The advance of freedom does not come without cost or sacrifice. Last November, I was in South Korea during their debate on whether or not they should send South Korean forces to Iraq. A woman journalist came up to me and put a microphone in front of my face -- she was clearly too young to have experienced the Korean war -- and she said to me in a challenging voice: ?Why should young South Koreans go halfway around the world to Iraq to get killed or wounded??

Now that's a fair question. And I said it was a fair question. I also told her that I had just come from the Korean War memorial in Seoul and there's a wall that has every state of the 50 states in the United States with [the names of] all the people who were killed in the Korean War. I was there to put a wreath on the memorial and before I walked down there I looked up at the wall and started studying the names and there, of course, was a very dear friend from high school who was on a football team with me, and he was killed the last day of the war -- the very last day.

And I said to this woman, you know, that would have been a fair question for an American journalist to ask 50 years ago -- why in the world should an American go halfway around the world to South Korea and get wounded or killed?

We were in a building that looked out on the city of Seoul and I said, I'll tell you why. Look out the window. And out that window you could see lights and cars and energy and a vibrant economy and a robust democracy. And of course I said to her if you look above the demilitarized zone from satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula, above the DMZ is darkness, nothing but darkness and a little portion (Inaudible.) of light where Pyongyang is. The same people had the same population, the same resources. And look at the difference. There are concentration camps. They're starving. They've lowered the height for the people who go in the Army down to 4 feet 10 inches because people aren't tall enough. They take people in the military below a hundred pounds. They're 17, 18, 19 years old and frequently they look like they're 13, 14, and 15 years old.

Korea was won at a terrible cost of life -- thousands and thousands and thousands of people from the countries in this room. And was it worth it? You bet.

The world is a safer place today because the Coalition liberated 50 million people -- 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq.

RTWT

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 07, 2004 10:13 AM

Comments

Thanks for finding and posting this, Rand. Rumsfield is awesome, in the true sense of the word.

Posted by Barbara Skolaut at February 7, 2004 10:46 AM

Brilliant. Makes me proud to be an American. I wish Rummy's words would be broadcast on mainstream network TV news. I also wish the Pres. Bush could articulate well enough to get this message out.

Posted by Fred K. at February 7, 2004 11:56 AM

One point Rummy could have made

Casualties. Look at the difference in casualties between the Korean War and the Iraq War. Odds are America will get out of Iraq with less than 1,000 dead. Compare that to the 50,000 dead America suffered during the Korean War. That difference is the difference between Pre-emption and Reaction. America reacted to the crisis in Korea when we weren't really ready for it. Iraqi pre-emption was battle chosen at a time and place of America's choosing. Look at the difference.

Posted by Brad at February 7, 2004 02:35 PM

Saddam Hussein could have opened up his country to the world

Uh, Saddam Hussein did open up his country to the world. U.N. inspectors were on the ground in Iraq in February 2003. They found nothing because, as is now becoming clear, there was nothing to find.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 8, 2004 09:27 AM

No, Ron, he just let Hans Clouseau in to blunder around for a few weeks while continuing to throw up roadblocks.

We know what disarming countries look like. We saw it in the Ukraine, we saw it in South Africa, and we're now seeing it in Libya. Saddam's Iraq never looked like that. Saddam always looked like he had something to hide, and he never lived up to his Gulf War obligations.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 8, 2004 09:35 AM

>We know what disarming countries look like.

Obviously we do not. What part of "we were all wrong" did you not understand?

Posted by Ron Garret at February 8, 2004 12:45 PM

The only thing "we were all wrong" about was stockpiles. Kay himself said that Saddam's Iraq was even more dangerous than we estimated before the war. He had clearly not given up the goal of attaining WMD, which is what was required of him by the UN.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 8, 2004 01:07 PM

Ron:

The fact that we are even having this debate, whereas we are not about Ukraine or South Africa, should suggest that there is a fundamental difference between Iraq and the rest.

Where was the documentation about what the Iraqis did w/ their munitions? Where, still, are the thousands of liters of growth media?

Let's say the Iraqis took it out into the desert and dumped it all. Where's the people that drove those trucks or monitored it being dumped?

Iraq never provided the evidence that, under a Ch. VII UNSCR, it was obligated to do.

Which is why we're still wondering what happened to the stuff.

BTW, how can you claim that he opened up his country, when the UNSCOM inspectors regularly had to do such things as converse OUTSIDE THEIR ROOMS in order to surprise the Iraqis? Last I checked, the Ukrainians and South Africans did not try to move stuff out the back, while inspectors walked in the front.

Posted by Dean at February 8, 2004 09:00 PM

The only thing "we were all wrong" about was stockpiles.

You say that as if it's a trivial detail. What do you think the word "disarm" means?

He had clearly not given up the goal of attaining WMD

You ever see "Minority Report"? Or read Orwell? Are you saying that it is right to invade a country because its leader is guilty of a thought crime?

The fact that we are even having this debate, whereas we are not about Ukraine or South Africa, should suggest that there is a fundamental difference between Iraq and the rest.

Of course there's a fundamental difference: we didn't invade Ukraine or South Africa on the basis of bad intelligence.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 8, 2004 09:29 PM

The word "disarm" was well defined in the agreement that ended the first Gulf War. He never complied.

And please, a "thought crime"?

He didn't just click his heels together three times and wish for weapons--he funded his scientists to produce them, by their own admission, even if they cheated him and didn't. If you want to call it "attempted development of WMD," fine. The penalty should be the same, given his record of using them when he did have them, even if he was incompetent at it.

And the fact that we didn't have to invade South Africa or the Ukraine is utterly irrelevant. The point is that they demonstrated how to disarm, and Saddam demonstrated how not to. Not to mention the fact that WMD was never put forth as the sole reason for the invasion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 8, 2004 09:37 PM

> If you want to call it "attempted development of WMD," fine. The penalty should be the same

Says you. I think the American People should have had an opportunity to make that call.

Imagine if Rummy & Son had stood up in February of 03 and said, "We do not know for sure has has WMD. We're pretty sure he does. We can't imagine any reason he would have destroyed the weapons we know he had (because we provided them to him). But at the moment we can't prove it. If he still has them he's hidden them well enough that we can't find them (because if we could we'd tell the UN inspectors on the ground where they were so they could provide us with the smoking gun). Still, it's pretty clear that in this man's heart of hearts he has not given up on his ambitions to possess WMDs. Therefore we should invade his country and forcibly depose him." If they'd said that and the American People had approved the war anyway we would not be having this conversation. (We might be having a different conversation about, say, how foolish it was to start WW3, but that's neither here nor there.)

But they didn't say that. And I'm pretty sure that the reason they didn't is because they knew perfectly well that if they had the American People would have laughed in their faces. We are easily snookered (just look at how many people buy the NASA party line about space exploration), but we are by and large not stupid.

> Saddam demonstrated how not to

How is it that Saddam becomes your poster boy for non-disarmament when we've got the North Koreans over here saying, "Hello! We're building nukes! Here's our plutonium!"? [sarcasm]What's it going to take before you Rummy worshippers wake up to the real danger? A mushroom cloud over LA?[/sarcasm]

> WMD was never put forth as the sole reason for the invasion.

True, there were a whole lot of other allegations that also turned out to be false, like Saddam supporting Al Qaeda. But the WMDs were the centerpiece of the argument. 45 minutes from Saddam's order to sarin in the streets of London.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 9, 2004 09:19 AM

I can't imagine either of them saying that, Ron, because much of it is nonsense. Nice strawman attempt, though.

And Saddam isn't the poster boy for non-disarmament--remember the axis of evil? The main difference is that it was possible to remove him without killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroying much of South Korea.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 9, 2004 09:30 AM

> remember the axis of evil?

Yep. I remember Bush excoriating Al Gore for wanting to engage in nation building too. Can't recall the administration talking about either one recently though.

> it was possible to remove him without killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroying much of South Korea.

No, the cost was merely ten thousand or so innocents (hard to say exactly since no one is really keeping count).

But to bring this back to the point: Rummy & Son didn't make that argument. They didn't say, "We have serious threats coming from Iraq, Iran and North Korea, but the cost of invading North Korea is too high so we'll invade Iraq instead because we can do that and keep the civilian body count down to a mere four or five digits instead of six or seven."

The argument that they made was the only argument that stood a chance of passing the laugh test: Saddam had WOMD, and he therefore presented an imminent threat to the United States. Trick is, it wasn't true. But now instead of just facing up to the fact that it wasn't true, that they sold the war on the basis of (let's be charitable) a mistake and taking resonsibility for it, they are now trying to sell us on the idea that it doesn't matter. Notwithstanding that "we were all wrong" it was all Saddam's fault because he didn't document whatever he did to get rid of his WOMDs.

Would it have been better if Saddam had dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's? Of course. Did the fact that he didn't justify war? Maybe, maybe not. The problem IMO is that the American People were never given the chance to make that call.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 9, 2004 11:32 AM

If by "innocents" you mean non-combatants, there's no evidence that it was anywhere near that many.

All I can say is that you must have been listening to different speeches than I was. I never heard WMD used as the primary justification for the war--I heard many justifications of which it was only one. WMD only became a dominant issue in the public mind because it was the one that was focused on in the UN (and one that few disputed at the time--the issue was how to get him to disarm, not whether or not he should).

And, no, Bush had no interest in nation building prior to September 11, 2001. That event changed his attitude toward many things. It doesn't seem to have had much effect on the left, though. The Dems seem to be pretending that it's still September 10th.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 9, 2004 11:40 AM

>If by "innocents" you mean non-combatants, there's no evidence that it was anywhere near that many.

Actually there is:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=489082

Just because the U.S. and British governments are burying their heads in the sand about this issue doesn't mean everyone is.

> the issue was how to get him to disarm

[puzzled expression] Well, yeah. This brings me back to the question I originally posed: just what do you think the word "disarm" means? Here's what the dictionary has to say about it:

Disarm (n): To divest of a weapon or weapons.

Just what do you think the "weapon or weapons" in question were, Saddam's collection of Swiss army knives?

Posted by Ron Garret at February 9, 2004 12:43 PM

My point is that at the time, almost everyone (including those opposed to the war) thought that he was armed.

And even if the number is ten thousand (I suspect that it will turn out to be as bogus as Mark Herrold's double and triple counting of anecdotes in Afghanistan), that's not tens of thousands. And even if it is, many more would have died had Saddam remained in power.

Apparently, it's all right to kill Iraqis as long as it's done by Ba'athists. Please spare me your faux concern over Iraqi civilians.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 9, 2004 12:57 PM

> My point is that at the time, almost everyone (including those opposed to the war) thought that he was armed.

That's right. But those who opposed the war hedged against the possibility that they might be wrong and that Saddam might already be disarmed notwithstanding all indications to the contrary. Rummy & Son didn't hedge. They put their (our) money down on WOMD and now that they lost that bet they want to welch by saying it was all Saddam's fault notwithstanding that there were no weapons. It's particularly shameful and hypocritical coming from a group of men who profess to value accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions.

> that's not tens of thousands

Who ever said that it was?

> many more would have died had Saddam remained in power.

And you know this how?

> it's all right to kill Iraqis as long as it's done by Ba'athists.

And you accuse me of raising straw men?

No, it is not all right to allow Baathists to kill Iraqis. If it were up to me we would have deposed Saddam in 1979. But we didn't because we needed Saddam to fight our proxy war against Iran. God only knows why we didn't depose him in 1991 (to my mind our failure to support the 91 uprising - an uprising that we called for - is one of the most shameful chapters in American history). But given that we allowed him to stay in power for twenty five years I fail to see how a few more months would have pushed us significantly further off the moral high ground than we already were.

> Please spare me your faux concern over Iraqi civilians.

Excuse me, but I wasn't the one who originally raised the concern over civilian deaths, you were (to say nothing of the fact that I think I'm in a better position to judge what concerns me than you are). Shall I ask you to spare me your faux concern and return to the issue of why we're not invading North Korea?

Posted by Ron Garret at February 9, 2004 02:50 PM

But those who opposed the war hedged against the possibility that they might be wrong and that Saddam might already be disarmed notwithstanding all indications to the contrary.

No, they just thought (or claimed to think--in the case of most the French, Germans and Russians, I believe that they were desperate to keep him in power) that he could be disarmed with arms inspectors, not that he had already disarmed.

And sorry--I misread your post above about the number of casualties. But the point remains that worrying about civilian deaths in a country being liberated is qualitatively different than doing so in a neighboring country (which would be the case in South Korea). Given the horrific situation in North Korea, it would be almost impossible for war to make things worse for the Nork populace with a war to overthrow their odious regime, but the cost to the South Koreans, currently living in relative freedom and prosperity, would be horrendous.

And I know that many would die in Iraq absent removing Saddam because many died under his rule on an ongoing basis, both from state murder and from deprivation, and there was no sign that he was reducing his rate of brutality and murder.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 9, 2004 03:06 PM

No, they just thought ... that he could be disarmed with arms inspectors

And they were right.

> but the cost to the South Koreans, currently living in relative freedom and prosperity, would be horrendous.

If Saddam had actually had WOMD the cost to the Israelis, also living in relative freedom and prosperity, might also have been horrendous. So I don't see how the situation in Korea is any different.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 9, 2004 09:34 PM

And they were right

That is not at all apparent, and certainly wasn't at the time. We don't know where the weapons went, or their disposition at the time the inspectors were wandering around Iraq. The point remains that he was not cooperating, or providing any information as to the fate of his weapons, which was what disarming countries do. He was simply grudgingly letting them come in to look for them.

As for your comparison of North/South Korea and Iraq and Israel, my only comment is that you seem utterly innocent of the different strategic situations (hint, Saddam didn't have massive artillery buried deep in tunnels within range of any part of Israel). North Korea can threaten Seoul even without WMD, and negating that threat is very difficult (and perhaps currently impossible, which is at least partly why that problem doesn't presently have a military solution).

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 9, 2004 10:15 PM

> you seem utterly innocent of the different strategic situations

No, I am simply going on your assumptions. If Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States and Britain, as Rummy & Son and Tony Blair claimed at the time, then surely he was also a threat to Israel. You can't have it both ways. Either he was a threat or he wasn't. Either collatoral damage to civilians is acceptable or it is not. Reasonable people can differ over those issues, but I don't see any way to justify war in Iraq that does not also justify war in North Korea, unless you start to get into some very strange (and ultimately untenable) calculus about the exact exchange rates between Israeli, Iraqi, Korean and American lives.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 10, 2004 08:44 AM

Sigh...the myth (I'll do you the courtesy of not calling it a lie) that will not die. I wonder why?

They never said that he was an imminent threat. They said that we couldn't wait until he was, because it might be too late. The fact that our intelligence is imperfect (to say the least) only reinforces this point.

And the calculus is not untenable at all. A Korean war would be a near-term disaster for the entire Korean peninsula. The Iraq war was about as clean and quick as predicted, with no adverse effects on neighboring countries (except, perhaps, those like Syria that need some adverse effects).

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 10, 2004 10:20 AM

>Sigh...the myth (I'll do you the courtesy of not calling it a lie) that will not die. I wonder why?

Because it's the truth.

> They never said that he was an imminent threat.

The myth (I'll extend you the same courtesy) is that they never said he was an imminent threat because they never spoke the words "Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat to the security of the United States." Tony Blair said that Saddam Hussein was capable of launching a chemical attack on London within 45 minutes. Whether that is an "imminent threat" or a "grave and gathering danger" (to use George Bush's own words) is just quibbling over terminology. Call it what you will, it was the centerpiece of the argument for war, and it was false. Saddam Hussein was, we now know, a paper tiger, no more of a threat to the world than a hundred other two-bit thugs. Heck, Pakistan is a more urgent threat than Saddam Hussein. They are one election (or one coup) away from being a nuclear armed Islamic fundamentalist country.

Look, it doesn't matter whether it was "imminent" or "grave and gathering". Whatever it was, it was used as the justification not just for war, but for war now. You cannot make that argument without endorsing, even if tacitly, the idea that there is a certain urgency involved.

Posted by Ron Garret at February 10, 2004 12:10 PM

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