Kansas City Star March 02, 2006
Rumsfeld: Remember the Cold War
By Steve Kraske and Rick Montgomery
For those Americans already weary of the war on terror, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday offered a sobering rallying cry – “Remember the Cold War.”
“Let there be no doubt: we did not win the Cold War by luck, and our victory was not inevitable. It took perseverance and a confidence in our course, despite the many uncertainties, and there were uncertainties throughout,” he said.
During a 30-minute speech at the Truman Library in Independence, Rumsfeld called for patience, saying the battle against communism lingered not just a year or two, or 10 or 20.
“It was 40 years later,” following President Truman’s exit from office, that the walls of communism finally collapsed, Rumsfeld told the 200 invited listeners.
The secretary’s address was another in a series of speeches by the president and Bush administration leaders warning of the long struggle ahead.
By visiting the presidential museum of a prominent Democrat, Rumsfeld stressed the need for deeper bipartisan cooperation in a struggle that so far has been full of partisan conflict. In the Cold War, leaders of both parties, such as Truman and Kennedy, Eisenhower and Reagan, “understood clearly the menace we faced.”
Like the past dangers of spreading communism, the current threat of terrorism is murky, he said. “Both required our nation to gird for a long, sustained struggle, punctuated by periods of military conflict. Both require the use of all elements of national power to defeat the enemy.”
Some experts stumbled over Rumsfeld’s comparisons between containing the ideology of the old Soviet Union and fighting today’s terrorists – or ousting Saddam Hussein from Iraq.
“He’s got an apples and oranges problem” lumping the behavior of Iraq, Iran and other hostile nations into a global fight against terrorism, said John Pike of defense consultant Globalsecurity.org. “This is the global war on things that annoy us…”
He dubbed the Rumsfeld speech – parts of which the secretary delivered in Washington last month – as “the long-war speech.”
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Pike said, “we’ve found an endless procession of problems that we feel require a military solution. It’s become so ordinary for us to go out and blow people up.”
Owen Cote, at the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had problems with the terminology.
“Communism was an ideology. Terrorism is a tactic,” “It (terrorism) is not a system of government. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a method of organizing people.”
Rumsfeld was correct, however, in characterizing the unpopular sentiments – at home and abroad – that Truman met in his early fight what he saw as a growing Red menace, said Truman Museum archivist Randy Sowell.
“There was a lot of resistance” to the Truman Doctrine unveiled in March 1947, which initially lent U.S. aid against Communist insurgencies in Greece and Turkey, Sowell said. “There were public concerns about U.S. meddling in global affairs. Isolationism didn’t just disappear with World War II.”
“Our country was tired after the Second World War,” Rumsfeld said in the speech. “Strong strains of isolationism still persisted.”
And yet, he said, the leaders of both parties “tended to get the big things right. They understood that war had been declared on our country – on the free world – whether we liked it or not. And that we had to steel ourselves against an expansionist enemy, the Soviet Union, that was determined to destroy our way of life.”
Rumsfeld proclaimed his admiration for Truman early in his speech, and he underscored his interest in a lingering 90-minute tour of the library and museum where the president spent much of his final years.
Accompanied by museum director Michael Devine and Truman’s eldest grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, Rumsfeld paused at exhibits to read and reflect on the 33rd president’s legacy.
On several occasions, the 73-year-old defense secretary pointed to people standing in the background of photographs as people he recognized as former colleagues from his days as an Illinois congressman. Before a photograph of the massive renovation of the White House during Truman’s administration, Rumseld piped up that the president lived across the street for several years at Blaire House where, in 1950, an assassination attempt occurred.
“I’ve been around so long I remember that stuff,” Rumsfeld quipped.
Stepping away from Truman’s gravesite in the middle of the library complex, Devine told Rumsfeld about Truman’s mother-in-law, Madge Wallace, who never thought her son-in-law was the right man for the presidency. Rumsfeld chuckled.
Inside the former president’s private library office, Rumsfeld brought up the topic again when looking at the pictures on Truman’s desk.
“Does he have a picture of the mother-in-law?” Rumsfeld quipped. “Just checking.”
Earlier, Rumsfeld lingered for more than 15 minutes in the basement White House Decision Center where a group of Grandview High School students were re-creating a White House news conference from Truman’s era where the president was taking questions about defending South Korea.
“You never have all the information you like to have,” Rumsfeld later told the group. “Events move rapidly. Some of your earlier decisions affect what happens and change your later decisions.”
If you find the situation complicated and things not as clear as you’d like, then welcome to the life of a defense secretary, Rumsfeld said. “You’re finding it exactly the way it is.”
The worst thing that can happen, he explained, is for the president to get faint-hearted and change fundamental decisions. You adjust for new realities, but once basic decisions are made, “You’ve got to stick with it.”
Pointing to post-war U.S. support for Japan in his speech, Rumsfeld said the aid helped the island nation become a “stalwart democracy.”
He also cited American support for Greece, Turkey and South Korea that saved all three from communist takeover. Of South Korea, he said the difference in the economy of that nation compared with North Korea is stark, especially seen from a satellite photograph of the nation at night.
South Korea is full of light, Rumsfeld said. North Korea is mostly dark.
Those foreign policy initiatives found little support at home, Rumsfeld pointed out. “Indeed, a former diplomat in the closing days of World War II said that `democracy would never work’ in Japan. A 1946 Life Magazine article was titled, `Americans Are Losing The Victory In Europe.
“Yet President Truman, and his successors in both political parties, had the courage, however, to hold firm, understanding the necessity of helping other nations become democratic allies for the long struggle ahead.”
A similar rationale was in play with the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said.
It was his only reference from his prepared remarks to the Iraq conflict, the war in which he was a major architect. The fight has grown unpopular (59 percent of Americans disapproved in February of the way the war was being handled) as the insurgency seemed to grow and the U.S. death toll passed 2,300.
Rumsfeld, who has pronounced, “I don’t do quagmires,” has said U.S. troops could draw down this year as more Iraqi security forces are trained, but the increased sectarian fighting in Iraq may threaten those plans.
Truman grandson Daniel introduced Rumsfeld on Tuesday. Daniel later said, “I’m never surprised” that a lifelong Republican such as Rumsfeld – who came to Congress just a decade after Truman left office – now travels to Independence and heaps such praise on a Democratic president.
“Grandpa always seems to cross party lines,” Daniel said.
Twenty cadets traveled from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., to hear Rumsfeld talk. Sophomore Chris Kinsel of LaFayette, Calif., said he was looking forward to facing the challenges Rumsfeld laid out.
“He’ll be my boss soon,” Kinsel said. “I have tremendous faith in our senior (military) leadership…I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t on board.”
© Copyright 2006, Kansas City Star
