Useful Fools

Dr. Condoleezza Rice gave the the Ronald Reagan Lecture this week. It covered a broad range of issues, including a new warning to North Korea. Here are excepts:

Libya’s leader made the right choice, and other regimes should follow his example. We are working with the international community to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. And with our four partners in East Asia, we are insisting that North Korea completely, verifiably, and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear programs.

Now, the North Koreans should also recognize that, with the unraveling of these proliferation networks, the A.Q. Kahn network, what the Libyans are now freely admitting and talking about, that their admissions and what they say is not the only source of information about what’s going on in North Korea. And it’s probably a good time for the North Koreans to come clean about what’s going on in North Korea.

A bit of history on the blindness of the left, and seeing past the surface:

I remember one particular one when I served on a panel discussing the Zero Option — the complete elimination of all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles. This was in San Francisco, in the early 1980s, at the height of the nuclear freeze movement. I was a young academic, just starting out. And I’d like to think that they invited because of my rising reputation. But it’s entirely possible that I was the only person in the entire San Francisco Bay area who would actually support the Reagan policy. (Laughter and applause.) I defended that position as best I could, against an older gentleman who strenuously argued that President Reagan and his belligerent rhetoric were the real problems. Aggressive Soviet behavior was understandable, given the threat that Moscow perceived from Reagan. President Reagan’s proposed response — deploying American missiles to counter any increase in Soviet missiles — would only make things worse, so on and so on. I’d like to think that I won the debate. But looking back, I have my doubts because afterwards, several women in the audience — clearly Reagan opponents and Nuclear Freeze supporters — approached me. They thanked me for doing so much for peace, and for standing up to that awful Reagan. (Laughter.) I think they looked at me, a young, black female and they just assumed that I was an opponent of President Reagan. After listening to me for an hour, clearly, they were unable to see past the surface of things.

But in truth, we arms controllers were having trouble seeing past the surface of things. We were fixated on a host of details: megatons, MIRVS, throw weights, and verification measures. We were absolutely determined to get the best possible deal with the Soviet Union and, in retrospect, we missed the big picture. Ronald Reagan the big picture. He challenged the whole premise of arms control and the whole premise of Soviet power. For him, arms control was a means, not an end. The end he sought were nothing less than the end of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the victory of liberty over tyranny. To achieve these ends, he had to challenge most — if not all — the received wisdom of the time. That is what great leaders do — and what only they can do.

Bush’s 3 Pillars of Foreign Policy:

These are principles that great leaders have put into practice during challenging times — and these are challenging times. Thus, the President calls on America to use our unparalleled strength and influence to create a balance of power that favors freedom. His vision stands on three pillars. First, we will defend the peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes. Second, we will preserve the peace by fostering an era of good relations among the world’s great powers. And third, we will extend the peace by seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe.

On 9-11

The attacks of September the 11th, 2001, were the greatest strategic shock that the United States has experienced since Pearl Harbor. These attacks crystallized our vulnerability to plots hatched in different lands, that come without warning, bringing tragedy to our shores. These attacks made clear that sweeping threats under the rug is simply not an option.

President Bush saw the implications of that immediately. The very day of the attacks — as smoke still rose from the Pentagon, and the rubble of the Twin Towers, and that field in Pennsylvania — he told us, his advisors, that the United States faced a new kind of war and that the strategy of our government would be to take the fight to the terrorists…

And of course, we also face every day the possibility of our worst nightmare: the possibility of sudden, secret attack by chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons, the coming together of the terrorist threat with the world’s most dangerous weapons. September 11th made clear our enemies’ goals and provided painful experience of how far they are willing to go. From the terrorist’s own boasts, we know that they will not hesitate to use the world’s most terrible weapons. In fact, they would welcome the chance to do it.

On the foolishness of past non-proliferation efforts:

For so many years, the world pretended that important treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were keeping this problem in check. For many years, the world marked time while the proliferation threat gathered. For many years, the world refused to live up to the resolutions — resolution after resolution — which it had passed.

On Iraq:

The decision to hold the Iraqi regime accountable after twelve years of defiance is another part of an aggressive strategy to deal with the proliferation threat, because it has finally restored the credibility of the international community to do what it said. The former Iraqi regime was not just a state sponsor of terror. It was also for many years one of the world’s premier weapons of mass destruction-producing states. For twelve years, Iraq’s former dictator defied the international community, refusing to disarm or to even account for his illegal weapons and programs. We know he had both because he used chemical weapons against Iran and against his own people — because, long after those attacks, he admitted having to stocks and programs to U.N. inspectors. The world gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to disarm. He did not and now he is out of power.

Non-proliferaiton today:

And as we advance a broad non-proliferation agenda, we also recognize that proliferators cannot always be stopped by diplomacy alone. But they can be stopped.

The two paths to weapons of mass destruction:

We now know, however, that there are actually two paths to weapons of mass destruction — secretive and dangerous states that pursue them and shadowy, private networks and individuals who also traffic in these materials, motivated by greed or fanaticism or, perhaps, both. And often these paths meet. The world recently learned of the network headed by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. For years, Khan and his associates sold nuclear technology and know-how to some of the world’s most dangerous regimes, including North Korea and Iran.

Terrorism as the heir to communism:

We’ve been busy over the last several years, but as we move forward with this ambitious agenda, day by day, we never lose site of a central truth: Lasting peace and long-term security are only possible through the advance of liberty and justice. Military power alone cannot protect us from the defining threats of our time. The War on Terror, like the Cold War, is as much a conflict of visions as a struggle of armed force. All of the early heroes of the Cold War — Truman, and Churchill, and Adenauer — understood this. Decades later, we seemed poised to forget it, viewing the Soviet Union as just another state with interests, and its continued existence — even its permanence — as inevitable. It was President Reagan who peeled back the layers of complacency surrounding detente and saw that underneath, the Soviet Union had not changed, that the moral element of the early Cold War was still relevant. President Reagan re-infused the Cold War with moral purpose. And that renewed sense of purpose allowed the free world to prevail.

The terrorist ideology is the direct heir to communism, and Nazism, and fascism — the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. The struggle against terror is fundamentally a struggle of vision and values. The terrorists offer suicide, and death, and pseudo-religious tyranny. America and our allies seek to advance the cause of liberty and defend the dignity of every person. We seek, in President Bush’s words, “the advance of freedom, and the peace that freedom brings.”

Why democracy in Iraq and Iran are critical to our national interest:

The world is watching. The failure of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan would condemn millions to misery and embolden terrorists around the world. The defeat of terror and the success of freedom in those nations will serve the interests of our nation because free nations do not sponsor terror and do not breed the ideologies of murder. And success will serve our ideals, as free and democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the world.

Iraq as the central front on terrorism:

Because people like Zarqawi and their Al Qaeda affiliates and their Al Qaeda colleagues know that when Iraq is stable and peaceful and prosperous and democratic, that we will blow a huge hole in their sense of inevitability for this murderous jihad that they’re trying to carry out. That’s why Zarqawi and those people are in Iraq. And if you think for one minute that if we weren’t in Iraq, they were just going to be someplace drinking tea? No. (Laughter.) They were going to be fighting the jihad somewhere. They decide that they’re going to do it in Iraq because they know it’s an extremely important battle in the central front.

I’ve been really kind of amused that when the President said Iraq was on the central front in the war on terrorism, people said, oh, no, no, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the war on terrorism. What’s Zarqawi doing in Iraq? He seems to know it has something to do with the war on terrorism. So we need to get very clear on what it is we’re doing in Iraq.

On criticism from the left:

Well, Americans just need to step back for a moment and ask themselves several questions about what has happened over the last two-and-a-half years. We were brutally attacked on September 11th on our own territory. We didn’t know it was coming an hour before it happened. We didn’t know it was coming minutes before it happened. How do you know when you have let a gathering threat go too long? You know when somebody attacks. That’s not acceptable. And the President has said, he is going to do everything that he can not to put America in that position again. He tells everybody who comes into the Oval, my solemn duty is to protect the people of the United States of America. So one thing we can all agree on as Americans is we don’t ever want to go through September 11th again if we can humanly avoid it.

That means that you don’t get to go back to the days when we thought of terrorism as just some kind of law enforcement problem. Yes, there were people who were fighting to make us be more aggressive in Afghanistan and wipe out al Qaeda. There certainly were in the last administration and this administration. But we have not really mobilized our country for a war on terrorism. We had not mobilized the international community to recognize that, yes, you have to have broad sharing of intelligence, you have to have broad sharing of law enforcement. But you also have got to use when you must the military instrument to deprive them of sanctuary, which is what we did in Afghanistan, so that they don’t have camps in Afghanistan anymore — that you have to go after terrorist states that are a gathering threat like Saddam Hussein.

Who are we fooling? We went to war against them in 1991. I guess he was a threat; President Clinton bombed him in 1998. I guess he was a threat; he was shooting at our aircraft every day, practically, in the no-fly zones, as we flew military missions to try to keep him from harming his own people or from attacking his neighbors. He was shooting at our airplanes. He was defying the international community’s calls and demands that he disarm. This was one of the most dangerous regimes of all time — of recent times, sitting in the world’s most dangerous region.

Now, are we better off that he’s gone? Is the Middle East better off that he’s gone? Is it worth the sacrifice to rid this region of one of the most dangerous regimes in modern times? Yes.

And so that’s what we need to step back and look at. And if somebody has got a better idea of how to protect America, then I think they ought to put it forward. That’s the debate that I think we will have. That’s fine. That’s what debate is all about. But I hope that as we have the debate, we will also try very hard to send a strong message that America is going to stay after the terrorists, that America is not going to abandon the Iraqi people, that we will be there with them through this struggle, that the United States of America finishes the jobs that it began.

That’s a worthy debate for the United States of America, because the role of the United States is the major one in foreign policy. But at a time of consequence, you don’t have a choice but to take the difficult and tough road sometimes, and that’s what this President has done. (Applause.)