Rumsfeld Says Briefer's Views on Saudi Arabia Not U.S. Policy
(Nor are views those of Defense Policy Board, he says) (4450) The briefing given in July by a RAND Corporation expert to the Defense Policy Board, in which Saudi Arabia was characterized as "active at every level of the terror chain," does not represent U.S. policy, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says. Rumsfeld made the comment August 6 at a meeting with assembled Defense Department employees in which he delivered opening remarks and then answered questions. The meeting was open to media coverage. He responded to a question about a story in the August 6 Washington Post in which a RAND briefer is quoted as having told a Pentagon advisory board -- chosen from former high-ranking government officials with defense policy expertise -- that "Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies." The briefer's opinion, Rumsfeld said, "did not represent the views of the government; it didn't represent the views of the Defense Policy Board." "There was some outsider [who] came into the [Defense] Department, gave a briefing, left, and the impression is left that this is some sort of a policy decision on the part of the government, or that there's a view that that's the dominant opinion," Rumsfeld said. RAND is a private, nonprofit institution that conducts research and analysis aimed at improving policy and decision-making. Saudi Arabia, Rumsfeld continued, "is like any other country; it has a broad spectrum of activities and things ... that we agree with and some we may not." The United States has large military forces located there, he noted, and the Saudi government is "wrestling with" the fact that a number of its citizens were involved in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "But I don't know what the solution to it is," Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld also spoke at length about the situation in the Middle East regarding Israel and its neighbors. A one-time presidential envoy to the Middle East, he said the issue among Israel, its neighbors, and the Palestinians has been dominated by several facts. "One is periodic warfare," Rumsfeld said. "Second is the fact that the surrounding areas from Israel have preferred that Israel not be there. "And third is that the people that Israel has been trying to interact with ... have not had a structure and an accountability that would enable them to make a deal or keep a deal," he said. "If you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it," he continued. Rumsfeld also spoke about the global coalition against terrorism, as well as the need to have military personnel cease doing jobs that civilians or contractors could perform -- specifically referring to the Kosovo peacekeeping force and the Multinational Force observer mission in the Sinai. He also discussed the threat to deployed forces overseas from chemical and biological attacks, and the state of the effort on national missile defense, and he stressed the need for transformation of the military, both people and systems. Following are excerpts from his remarks: (begin excerpts) U.S. Department of Defense News Briefing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld August 6, 2002 (Pentagon Town Hall Meeting) Rumsfeld: On September 10th last year, things were, I guess you'd say, reasonably calm and normal here. On that day, I elaborated on our goal of transforming our capabilities and discussed the need to shift more resources from the bureaucracy to the battlefield. I said that a person engaged in an unnecessary or redundant task is one who could be countering terrorism or nuclear proliferation. That was the day before September 11th. The future arrived sooner than we expected. We were attacked the next day. The Department of Defense responded with power and with skill. Thanks to the coalition efforts and the remarkable courage of the men and women in uniform, al Qaeda, although still dangerous, is on the run around the world. The Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is no longer a base for global terrorist operations or a breeding ground for radical Islamic militancy. The beatings by religious police and executions in soccer stadiums have stopped. The humanitarian crisis has been averted. Aid is once again flowing. International aid workers and NGO workers are no longer being held hostage. And the Afghan people have been liberated. (Applause.) Those are truly remarkable accomplishments, and certainly every man and woman, military and civilian, can be proud of making a contribution to those successes. But despite the important progress that's been made, it is certainly no time for complacency. Think back to February 25th, 1993, things seemed pretty quiet that day as well, and the next day terrorists ignited a large bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. Six people died. Less than two months after the 1993 attack, The New York Times reported that most tenants in the World Trade Center buildings say that life has returned almost to normal. That was just what the terrorists wanted. And they spent time learning from their mistakes in that first attack. They upgraded their skills, and the next time they finished the job in both towers. Today, the Pentagon is nearly repaired, and life seems to be returning almost to normal. But that we must not do. Our enemies, without question, are sharpening their swords. They are plotting even greater destruction, let there be no doubt. To prevent that, we have to be stronger, more alert, quicker on our feet. If reducing bureaucracy and waste was important on September 10th, and it was, it is all the more important now. As we did in Afghanistan, we have to take the war to the terrorists. We have to go after them where they are, capture them, or otherwise disrupt their attacks. To prevent the next attacks, we need to be vigilant. We have to hunt down the terrorists and put them out of business. And to do so, we have to transform our capabilities, the capabilities of our military, as well as the way this department functions. We need faster, more agile, more balanced, more interoperable joint forces. We don't need services running off in four directions, and then, when the balloon goes up, wondering why they aren't as effective as a joint force as they could be. Or, even worse, why the phone doesn't ring, and they're left behind. Last week, I visited General Buck Kernan and the Joint Forces Command in Virginia. Their mission, of course, is transformation. They are testing, experimenting, innovating and energizing war-fighters for the 21st century. Buck and his team are doing an excellent job. The importance of the Joint Forces Command, in my view, is going to grow significantly in the months and years ahead as we focus on joint war-fighting and transportation -- transformation, as we must. And in the spirit of transformation, we developed a new defense strategy last year. We adopted a new approach to strategic deterrence that increases security while reducing our dependence on strategic nuclear weapons. The missile defense research and testing program has been reorganized and revitalized, free of the constraints of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty. We're investing in a range of new capabilities that should help us better defend our country in a dangerous and uncertain period that's ahead. We also fashioned a new Unified Command Plan and reorganized our worldwide military command structure and strengthened our focus on homeland security. Transformation, as I mentioned, means shifting resources from bureaucracy to the battlefield. Streamlining and modernizing is a matter of life and death, because our job is defending America as well as is humanly possible. We've asked Congress to let us close excess bases, upgrade our artillery, streamline our bomber forces. We've launched a major effort to modernize the department's business and financial operation and get the department's computers talking to each other for a change. We need every nickel, we need every innovation, every good idea to strengthen and transform our military. A new idea overlooked might well be the next threat overlooked. If we do not fix what is broken and encourage what is good and what works, if we do not transform, our enemies surely will find new ways to attack us, as they did after 1993. But the most important transformation involves not just dollars or weapons, but people. Smart bombs are useless without smart people. We need motivated, highly focused men and women working in this department, military and civilian, and we have them in abundance. Some are here in this room, and others are listening elsewhere today. We need your ideas. We need your suggestions. What you do is important. Each of you, I know, is here to help, to help make our country safer and better. The American people are certainly grateful for your service. So is the president, and so am I. I thank you for what you do for our country. And I would be happy to respond to questions.... Q: ... [M]y question is on Saudi Arabia, a nation that, of course, has been historically a friend for many, many generations. Several of us today were discussing the article in the Washington Post today, the front page of the Post, pointing out that there was a briefing here at some point to the Defense Policy Board, or Defense Review Board, whatever we call it. And it looked like there was a distancing between ourselves and the Saudis to some extent. And I pointed out that there are briefings here that go on every day that do not always constitute policy. And my question really is -- Rumsfeld: That's the understatement of the morning. (Laughter.) Q: My question really is, why do we have such divisive approach on the part of the media to issues that are as critical as the relationship with key elements, friends of ours, in the Middle East? And I just wanted to see if there was anything you wanted to say about that. Rumsfeld: Well, I saw the article, but I was so busy this morning I didn't have the time to sit around discussing it with my co-workers. (Laughter.) Just kidding. I'm just kidding. (Laughter.) Apparently what happened was the Defense Policy Board, which is made up of, oh, people who have worked in this department or have a great deal of knowledge or competence in government or the policy issues from the defense establishment -- a number of my predecessors serve on the Defense Policy Board, for example -- they have a meeting every period of months and they have briefings by people. And people come in and this apparently was a person from the Rand Corporation who was giving a briefing, and he briefed on Saudi Arabia, and it ended up in the newspaper, which is unfortunate. He had an opinion, and of course everyone has a right to their opinion. It did not represent the views of the government, it didn't represent the views of the Defense Policy Board. Clearly, somebody decided that it was a good idea to take something that was that potentially controversial -- I almost said "inflammatory" -- and give it to a newspaper, even though the meeting was a classified meeting and a closed meeting of the Defense Policy Board. I don't -- your question really ran more to the media, why does the media carry those things. And I suppose -- I don't work for the media, and as my wife tells me, "Don" -- when I go to work she says, "Don, don't forget, you have your job and they have theirs." (Laughter.) And they're different jobs. And I can't imagine why -- I focus more on the people who give out things from closed meetings to the press. I just think it's a terribly unprofessional thing to do and clearly harmful. It's harmful in this case, for example, because it creates a misimpression that someone then has to figure out a way to correct. There was some outsider came into the department, gave a briefing, left, and the impression is left that that is some sort of a policy decision on the part of the government, or that there's a view that that's the dominant opinion. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is like any other country; it has a broad spectrum of activities and things, some of which, obviously, just like our country, that we agree with and some we may not. It is, nonetheless, a country where we have a lot of forces located, and we have had a long relationship. And yet it is correct, as apparently somebody said in the briefing, that a number of the people who were involved on September 11th happened to have been Saudi individuals and that there's those issues that Saudi Arabia is wrestling with, just as other countries of the world are wrestling with them. But I don't know what the solution to it is. I think that something like that ending up out is kind of undoubtedly by somebody who wanted to make themselves feel important that they knew what was going on and that, therefore, they would tell someone else. And no lives are lost. On the other hand, when classified information is released that could affect the lives of men and women in uniform, that could inhibit and make more difficult the task of the United States of America in tracking down terrorists and, in fact, actively assist terrorists in figuring out what it is we're thinking and doing, I think it is criminal. ... Q: Sir, my question is what you think the administration's policy should ultimately be with regard to the West Bank settlements, for the Middle East peace process.... Rumsfeld: What do I think the U.S. policy ought to be with respect to the settlements in the occupied areas? Q: Yes, sir. Rumsfeld: Is that roughly the way you phrased it? Q: Yes, sir. Rumsfeld: Well -- (laughter) -- let me say this about that. (Laughter.) First of all, that's a matter for the Department of State -- (scattered laughter) -- and the president. Second, the U.S. policy, I think, ought not to be on a particular, isolated piece of that puzzle. I think to pull out one thing and say our policy on this ought to be X and our policy on some other issue ought to be Y -- I think that's unhelpful. The -- those problems have been going on since the country was established in the late '40s. It is a complicated set of issues. And it has been -- it has tended over time to have been dominated by a couple of facts. Several. One is periodic warfare. Second is the fact that the surrounding areas from Israel have preferred that Israel not be there. And third is that the people that Israel has been trying to interact with and find as an interlocutor have, for whatever reason, not been an effective interlocutor. That is to say, they have not had a structure and an accountability that would enable them to make a deal or keep a deal. And Barak made a proposal that was as forthcoming as anyone in the world could ever imagine, and Arafat turned it down. If you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it. If you're giving it to an entity that has some track record, that has a degree of accountability, that has the ability to enforce security that's promised in whatever arrangements are made, it seems to me that's one thing. If you're making a deal and yielding territory to an entity that cannot or will not do that -- and there is no question but that the Palestinian Authority have been involved with terrorist activities, so that makes it a difficult interlocutor. My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lost of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won. They have offered up -- successive prime ministers have offered up various portions of that so-called occupied territory, the West Bank, and at no point has it been agreed upon by the other side. I suspect it will be, even in my lifetime, that there will be some sort of an entity that will be established. Maybe it will take some Palestinian expatriates coming back into the region and providing the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick. It may be that the neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and others, will have to assist in providing a degree of accountability. But certainly everyone has to hope and pray that there will be something that could be an effective interlocutor so that they could make a deal. The settlement issues -- it's hard to know whether they're settlements in portions of the real estate that will end up with the entity that you make an arrangement with or Israel. So it seems to me focusing on settlements at the present time misses the point. The real point is to get an effective interlocutor. The real point is to get a condition so that you can have a peace agreement. And those are exactly the things that President Bush and Secretary Powell have been working on, and indeed, working particularly with Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Yes, sir? I thought it was gracious that he didn't mention that I'm a former Middle East envoy who failed to solve the problem. (Laughter.) Q: ... My question is, does the current environment with regard to defending America require decision-making with a decreased reliance on the consensus of other nations? And if the answer to that is yes, or even if it's no, how does that affect your job? Rumsfeld: Well, that's a very good question. There is no question we are in a distinctly different security environment in the 21st century. There is also no question that it takes time for all of us -- the American people, the Congress, the executive branch, as well as other countries -- to kind of navigate or migrate over so that we have our head properly wrapped around the new security environment. I think that there is a great deal of hype in the press about U.S. unilateralism and independent decision-making, which is really inaccurate. If you think about it, the United States has a coalition going in the global war on terrorism in less than a year that has something like 90 nations involved. We have something like 18 countries engaged in Afghanistan. Tom -- General Tom Franks, who is doing a terrific job in Central Command in Tampa, has 37 nations represented at the one- or two-star level in his command as liaison people. We have -- as Saddam Hussein would say, "the mother of all coalitions" -- (laughter) -- going on. And yet, we see these burbles in the press implying that it's some sort of a unilateralist approach. It is not. What we have said, and I think it's terribly important, is that we've got a big, complicated world, and the mission has to determine the coalition. And you must not fashion a coalition and then let it determine the mission. To the extent you do that, you end up dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. And it seems to me that we can't do that. So, what we have to recognize is that we need all the help we can get in this world, and like-thinking nations with us need all the help we can get, and what we ought to do is take it on the basis that others are willing to do it. If they want to cooperate with us in a coalition to achieve this particular goal, terrific. But if next week we have a goal that we're also working on and they don't want to participate in that, fair enough. That doesn't mean we shouldn't let them in this one. We need, for example, intelligence sharing from everybody in the world who's like-thinking. We need people to offer base rights and overflight rights from as many countries as possible. We need people who are willing to help us track down terrorists. Sure, we also would like people to join the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. But at any one time, we can only get about six or seven. We shouldn't reject them if -- and we also have coalition forces where we have many more than six or seven countries. But because those many more won't participate in the ISAF doesn't mean we don't want them in the coalition. So, I think that it may be fun for some European parliamentarian to stand up and play to his constituents by saying that the United States is a unilateral state and should be listening more to what we're saying, it's nonsense when they say that. We are deeply involved with countries all across the globe, in NATO, in other alliances, and the cooperation in this coalition and the global war against terrorism is breathtaking in its size and in its depth and in its value. So there! (Laughter.) Yes, sir? Q: ... I have a question with regards to op[erations] tempo. ... I was wondering, what are we going to do to reduce the strain on the military and maybe allow people to be in places longer than 18 months? Rumsfeld: ... [W]e're trying to use the pressure that op[erations] tempo presents to do the things I mentioned earlier: to get more military people stopping doing things that aren't military jobs and get them back into jobs that are needed by uniformed folks, to have more things be done by contractors, more things be done by civilian employees, to find things we can stop doing. If you're in a global war on terror, you don't have to keep doing everything you've been doing all along. It's a different world. We can stop doing some things. And we ought to find things we don't need to do.... We're drawing down in Bosnia and Kosovo. I talked to General Ralston two days ago, and you look at the chart, it's going like that. We're -- with all NATO countries. We've put more pressure on fixing the civilian side and get those folks down. We've had meetings this week about how we can start to begin to pull some of the folks out of the Sinai that have been there for 22 years. Seems a little long to me. (Laughter.) So we're working the problem.... Q: ... My question deals with weapons of mass destruction. And specifically, DOD has many priorities. Where does the chemical and biological threat for our forces overseas stand amongst your priorities -- (off mike)? Rumsfeld: Well, it has to be high, and there's no question but the Defense Planning Guidance, which was completed a few months ago and is now being, the good Lord willing, bled into the budget-build process and the studies that have been made, so that the '04-'09 budget will reflect those priorities, clearly addressed that subject. You're right, it is a world where these capabilities have proliferated. They are available to people and countries and terrorists that want them. We have to recognize that our country has to not only be able to deal with those things to the extent it's possible here in the United States, but also with respect to deployed forces overseas. So it is a real threat. If you think of what anthrax did in terms of people's concerns here in Washington, and anthrax is not contagious, you just have to take your mind over and think about a contagious agent that could infect so many more people so much more rapidly to understand the importance and the priority that it must have. Q: ... I had the honor -- this is kind of a follow-up on this from a bigger scale. I had the honor of working on the national missile defense program and ... I'm just curious, where are we going with that? I've kind of been out of the program for two years now, and what your perspectives are on that, sir? Rumsfeld: Well, when I came in, it had been locked in a mode that it could not look at or think about or dream of anything that would violate the ABM Treaty. We're now beyond that. And the treaty has been set aside; the sky did not fall; Russia is -- was met with kind of a yawn when it finally happened. And despite all of our concerns that were expressed out of Europe that they didn't believe that was a good idea, they now are comfortable because Russia was comfortable. So, that program is now focused very much across the spectrum in attempting to look and find ways that we can defend against missile defense, missiles, ballistic missiles. We also have to worry about cruise missiles, to be perfectly honest. And it is, I believe -- I'm due to be briefed on that sometime in the next 20-30 days to get current. And they're moving towards the point where some decisions are going to have to be made, because after you do a research and development and experimental -- in that mode for a period, at some point, you begin to get a sense of what's working and what's not working, in which case you want to move some of the funds from the things that have less prospect into things that will have greater prospect of success. And I think we're very close to that time.... (end excerpts) (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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