Rumsfeld On Iraq

Big potluck at work today. Not much energy left for mental function. Must...digest.... Short...post....

Monday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. His speech is reprinted in today's Wall Street Journal Opinion page. Some key points:

Here were some of the results: 63% of people in the news media thought the enterprise would fail. So did 71% of people in the foreign affairs establishment and 71% in academic settings or think tanks. Interestingly, opinion leaders from the U.S. military are optimistic about Iraq by a margin of 64% to 32%. And so is the American public, by a margin of 56% to 37%.

And the Iraqi people are also optimistic. I've seen this demonstrated repeatedly--in public opinion polls, in the turnout for the elections, and that tips to authorities from ordinary Iraqis have grown from 483 to 4,700 tips in a month.

Quitting is not a strategy. Quitting is an invitation to more attacks and more terrorist violence here at home. This is not just an hypothesis. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia emboldened Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. We know this. He has said so.

The message retreat in Iraq would send to the free people of Iraq and to moderate Muslim reformers throughout the region would be that they can't count on America. The message it would send to our enemies would be: that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere.

What is needed is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, we should be focused on a strategy for success.

Our country is waging a battle unlike any other in history. We are waging it in a media age unlike any that war fighters have ever known. In this new century, we all need to make adjustments--in government and in the media. And change is hard.

But to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we are all Republicans. We are all Democrats. We are all Americans. We are all in this together. And what we do today will not only impact us, but our children and our grandchildren, and the kind of world they will live in.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, because I left out a lot of good points.