Donald Rumsfeld Known and Unknown interview on February 28, 2011 This is an unedited transcript of the interview

Transcription

1 Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Born in 1932 in a Chicago suburb, Donald Henry Rumsfeld has served as a pilot in the United States Navy; as a member of Congress from Illinois; as Ambassador to NATO under President Nixon; as White House Chief of Staff and then Secretary of Defense, the youngest Secretary of Defense in history under President Ford; as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the pharmaceutical corporation GD Searle and Company; and as Secretary of Defense once again and this time as the oldest Secretary of Defense in history under President George W. Bush. Now Chairman of the Rumsfeld Foundation, Mr. Rumsfeld is author of the new book Known and Unknown which as we sit here taping today is number one on the New York Times best seller list. Would that be the first good item you have ever received in the New York Times? Don t you know it is driving them crazy. The proceeds from this book go to whom? They go to the troops and their families and to the children and to the wounded and to the children of the fallen. You have a book here of some 800 pages. It quotes extensively from memoranda and other documents. If I, reading a paragraph say, "hmm, I wonder what the wider context was," what do I do? You can go to a website, we have digitized a major fraction of my archive and it is Rumsfeld.com and you can go from the quote to the end note right to the document and read the entire document that is in there. These are documents that for many cases I wrote, other people wrote and what they do is they tell the story. They explain how decisions are made; what was going on; what was the back and forth. And I think a person seriously interested in government and history will be able to go in there and actually come away with a sense of the complexity of the issues and the decisions. The title of the book is Known and Unknown and this of course comes from your remarks which instantly became famous at one of your press conferences. Yes. Well,you go ahead and explain what you said. Well I basically said the truth that there are known knowns: the things we know we know. There are known unknowns: the things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the things we don't know we don't know. And they are the dangerous ones. They are the ones that can get you. Page 1 of 16

2 One of the aspects of the book I found striking is that so much of it the terrorist attack of 9/11 is unprecedented; the notion on November 10 th [sic September 10 th ] that terrorists might fly airliners into buildings was an unknown unknown. It simply was not in anyone s consciousness, it was not a thought. Much of the book is groping towards what can we know, what should we be worrying about and watching large organizations cope with that. Known and Unknown let me quote you, Mr. Secretary I remember observing to those with me early that afternoon you're in the Pentagon an airplane has struck on nine-eleven I remember observing to those with me early that afternoon that America s prior history in responding to terrorism had not been effective. And you put down here a litany Letting Libya s Muammar Khadafi offer his role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; the first World Trade Center attack in 1993; the plotted assassination of George H. W. Bush by Iraqi agents the same year, America s retreat under fire Mogadishu in 1983; the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the East Africa attacks on the East African embassies in '98; the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole." You name there terrorist attacks that took place during every administration from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton. It is not a partisan comment. It's a comment about the United States and its what, its level of conscious why was the record so appalling until that moment on 9/11? Well it didn't happen all at once and most of it was outside the United States and in no instance was anything like 3,000 people killed, innocent men, women and children. It's the old story about frogs in water and if you turn the heat up just a little bit at a time, they end up dying, but they never jump out. Whereas if they jump in something hot they will jump out. This happened over a sustained period of time. We got adjusted to the changes in temperature if you will. And it was to our great misfortune that we had the failure of imagination, we did not anticipate that what we might have anticipated. Afghanistan: we attack on October 7 th. This is just weeks after 9/11 and by December 16 th you are able to make the first of your many visits to Afghanistan, to a liberated Afghanistan as you say. From Grant, from at least Grant on, the military forces of the United States have depended on mass and materiel; and in Afghanistan you and those working with you planned and executed the projection of power halfway across the globe, overturned a sitting government. We'll talk in a moment as we must about things that went wrong, but it is worth noting that this was an astonishing operation. How did you, how did the Pentagon pull that off when it ran against so much of the grain of American military tradition? I think a lot of credit goes to General Franks; to Dell Dailey General Dailey who was head of the Special Forces people; to George Tenant because of this very close relationship that was developed between our Special Forces, our Combatant Commander and the Central Intelligence Agency; and because we had the advantage of some militias on the ground, the Northern Alliance Forces that had been fighting the Taliban for years and had been notably unsuccessful. The combination of all of that creatively leveraged everything that needed to be leveraged for success. And I don't think there ever was a time when a major military operation used Special Forces as the spear point where they were what was used to accomplish it. And it was Page 2 of 16

3 thanks to the Northern Alliance and they did a lot to win. But it was the combination of our Air Force, our naval power and the ability to put people on the ground, Special Operations people who could use laser pointers on the Taliban on the al-qaeda and bring in air power to move them out and then the militias to occupy the ground. And how did the speed, the agility, the lethality of that attack in Afghanistan condition thinking about Iraq? Oh I don't know that it did. You didn't. No. Notably different situation, we didn't have the indigenous forces like the Northern Alliance or the Pashtun tribes on the south, the militias on the south that helped. Saddam Hussein had a formidable-sized army which was not the case with the Taliban, they had an army but it was not anything like Saddam Hussein s. Quite different circumstance, I mean it was much more conventional the Iraq effort. begins. Things Baghdad falls three weeks after the invasion. A couple of days later looting Looting didn't begin a couple of days later. As soon as any portion of the country was defeated, looting began. Looting began. You are changing Looting in Baghdad, excuse me. Okay. Sorry go ahead. But you're going from one regime to another regime. Right, right. And there is a period of disorder. If you go to World War II and look at what happened in Germany it was savagery, the looting and disorder that took place. So, as a layman, what's a kind of concise summary of what went wrong from the fall of Baghdad until the surge in 2007? Can you summarize? What would a student, say a college student Page 3 of 16

4 Well if you read the book, a student would read the book and you would see on the book and on the website all kinds of discussion of just that. To start with Saddam Hussein released something like 100,000 people from his prisons. The second, the Sunnis that were going to lose control of the country to the Shia in terms of the majority. Immediately began trying to form a Party of Return to take back the government. Saddam Hussein called for Jihad and brought in a bunch of Jihadists through Syria, through Iran, through North Africa and other countries, neighboring countries. And the Sunnis were concerned about the way things were going and al-qaeda got in there and began its process of working with the Sunnis and at least for a period until the awakening in early 2006 that began, the insurgency grew which had not been fully predicted by the intelligence community. Let me quote you again, Known and Unknown While the attraction of foreign Jihadists to the conflict in Iraq was possible, the fact is that our intelligence agencies failed to warn of the possibility. We would discover more gaps in intelligence. It turned out the Iraqi infrastructure was not in serviceable condition. It turned out that the Iraqi army did not remain in whole units capable of being used for reconstruction. It turned out that the Iraqi police was not a trustworthy professional force. WMDs, this litany, are these kinds of intelligence failures to be expected because intelligence is very hard on certain business or was this a failure that, within your wide range of experience in the federal government, lay outside the norm? How do you assess this? Well I have been around this business of national security things for quite a while and I do discuss it in the book. First of all, it's a very tough job: intelligence gathering. Second, you are dealing with closed societies. Third, things change and some are not knowable. You just don't know them. Now, we probably could have had a better read on the infrastructure then we did. I mean that's something that Saddam Hussein had been denying, the infrastructure and it was much more fragile. Their electric grid and things like that. Maybe that might have been knowable. How the insurgency would evolve I don't think was knowable and George Tenant talks about this in his book and said if they thought that was a big problem they would have put it in the Executive Summary and they did not. Right, right. Now, but I have seen intelligence shortfalls like that throughout my career over decades. Why? Because it's tough work, you can't expect that you are going to have perfect information which is I suppose why Eisenhower said "the plan is nothing, planning is everything." And you know that you have to plan and it could be very valuable planning, but when you make first contact with the enemy, the plan goes out and you begin to adapt and adjust to the things that the enemy has a brain and he starts doing things differently. So you didn't feel let down by the CIA? No I didn't at all. Page 4 of 16

5 Okay. It's a tough business. So but later comes It's easy to blame and criticize and all of that. No, no that is what I am trying to establish. Everyone has 20/20 hindsight, no. I think they have a darn tough job and generally they do a pretty good job. Okay, now however, later on we have again I will quote you Known and Unknown After a few in the CIA alleged that some policy officials had politicized intelligence, in 2004 I have to say I found this one of the most staggering assertions in the book In 2004 I, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, I asked not to receive my daily oral briefings from the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency had become so unreliable as a political matter that the Secretary of Defense of the United States said "keep 'em away from me." This was being reflected in the press, Daniel Drezner in the New York [inaudible] 2003 The CIA is in open revolt against the White House. First of all, in answer to your suggestion there, studies have been made and there is absolutely no truth. I think it was the 9/11 Commission that looked at this. Larry Silberman s commission? Well the Robb-Silberman Commission. Robb-Silberman, okay. And there is no truth to the idea that the Bush administration tried to politicize the intelligence. I don't think there is anyone who will say that Oh, I have seen Who knows anything about it. Right, but the CIA was accusing the administration, weren t they? No. All right. When you say the CIA, some person in the CIA was saying things like that, but I mean you could find some person in the State Department or the Defense Department or in the Page 5 of 16

6 CIA or anywhere, in the Congress who will say almost anything and they tend not to be the people at the top levels. But the short answer is that the independent commission found that was not the case. Now, just to correct the record, I had a terrific CIA briefer. And it went on fine and then they changed that person to another person and I have nothing against that person, but I started reading in the paper that somebody in the CIA was leaking to the press either the questions that were being asked by Bush administration officials, not me as it turned out. But others. The questions they were asking or the questions they were not asking. And I said to myself, "gee, I am not sure that is a good idea for them to be doing that. Therefore, I think what I will do is I will read the CIA materials every day and not have a briefer. If they are going to go back and report who is asking what, and then they are going to leak it to the press." I don't want anything to do with it. "I think maybe I will just read the materials and have someone on my staff ask the questions if there are questions I think they ought to ask." Okay, weapons of mass destruction, the notion that the Bush Administration politicized intelligence, nonsense. No evidence whatsoever. case. Absolutely false. No one has a shred of evidence to suggest that that's the Larry Silverman has said, in fact I interviewed Larry Silverman, Judge Silverman who is of the Silverman Robb Commission and he said that is a slander. All right. Carl Rove in his memoir says that perhaps his bitterest regret is failing to go on the offensive against the charge that they had politicized the intelligence. This whole notion Bush lied, people died, that he lied us into the war and Carl Rove says that over in the White House they made the decision, they weren't going to go into it, it would look defensive. Carl Rove is exactly right. Well that is the question. Was this a terrible mistake? It was. It was. It was a mistake on everyone s part and it s a shame. So the President of the Unite States, in retrospect, the President of the United States needed to carry the American people with him through those charges. Page 6 of 16

7 Uh-huh. All right. Known and Unknown we already talked about the way CIA, some that CIA were leaking News stories Known and Unknown repeated the widely believed canard that the State Department had been cut out of post-war planning, the stories bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Powell s top aides. You've got CIA leaking to such an extent that you are protecting yourself against being implicated in these leaks. You've got the Secretary of State s top aides leaking. I can't know where it looked like it was at the top. It sure looked like it to you. Yeah, yeah. Well. This looks like a And I told my people we will not leak, it's not professional; it is not fair to the President; it is not fair to the administration. How does that work? How does it work? Do you as Secretary of Defense get on the phone, of course there are deep historical and institutional reasons why Defense and State are at odds and have been under various different Secretaries Cap Weinberger, Jordan it goes way back. But do you get on the phone and say "Colin, what the heck is going on?" I did. You did. I did in person. All right. Without satisfaction. It kept on. All right. And I don't suggest that Colin Powell was doing it. No, no, but you use his top aides Some people over there Page 7 of 16

8 All right the feeling, this is no surprise to you, the war is not going as expected; the President is defensive before this notion that he lied, people died and the administration itself appears to be in disarray. I'm trying to grasp here just I'm thinking again of the Princeton senior as you were in 1954 when Adlai Stevenson gave that speech that so inspired you. What is the lesson here? What is the lesson here? Oh I think there are a lot of lessons here. I think that for one thing it is about time that we recognized that the institutions which we are dealing with were fashioned in the 1940s, the late 1940s in the Truman administration. I mean that is where National Security Council. CIA, National Security Council the old USIA all of those mechanisms were designed at the inflection point between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. We are now in the information age. We are now in the Twenty-first Century. They have served us reasonably well for 50 years. It is time it seems to me to have another Hoover Commission like existed, a bipartisan group of people to sit down and look at these things. Same thing with the international institutions: United Nations; NATO; the World Bank; the IMF. All of those were fashioned in the same period after World War II. Two more personalities here that you write about. One Paul Bremer who is Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority and you take after him for moving slowly, particularly with regard to giving authority to Iraqis themselves. I am quoting Known and Unknown Most troubling was that Bremer proved reluctant to cede any significant authority to the Iraqis. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard who likes you and enjoys this book and wrote a wonderful review of the book included though is feeling that I don't know. I am quoting Fred Barnes Bremer created the Iraqi Governing Council to advise him. In May 2004 a year after Bremer arrived, the IGC names Ayad Allawi Prime Minister. In 2005, this is less than two years after he arrives, there is a full fledged Iraqi Parliament" Fred Barnes That strikes me as a reasonably fast transition. Well, first of all, let's say this about Paul Bremer. Now he is an able person, he was willing to take on that tough job and a lot of good things happened under his tenure at CPA, at the Coalition Provisional Authority. There is no question but that we differed as to the pace at which things would happen. And if you look in my book I discuss the fact that most of the things I say about Bremer s pace came out of Bremer s book. I use his own words. He was very reluctant to give authority. He didn't think they could manage authority very well. He said that in his book. My attitude was and I know the State Department didn't agreed with Bremer, that they wanted to go at a slower pace. They connected for some reason the idea of a legitimacy of the government with a slower pace. My attitude was that you gain legitimacy by how well you perform and if you don't perform well you get changed. So I tried to discuss it in an analytical way and there were differences. I also think there was a In this person in my reading you are extremely respectful of pretty nearly everybody except Nelson Rockefeller and there you didn't get along well with Nelson Rockefeller. That's a separate program. In other words you are not out there slinging people. Page 8 of 16

9 No goodness, no. This is a book that I intend for people to better understand government and the history of what actually took place which is why there are hundreds of documents on the website that support what's in this book. One more, one more person, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice. Quoting you Known and Unknown Rice seemed to believe that it was a personal shortcoming on her part if she had to ask the President to resolve an inter-agency difference. Now, I believe it is plausible on the evident just of this conversation to say, over there at the Pentagon, we have a tough smart, hard working Secretary of Defense. We have a capable person in Iraq in the person of Paul Bremer and Colin Powell is a seasoned veteran and a patriot. And the three of these people disagree on very important matters. Why doesn t the National Security Adviser say "fellas, we're going to Camp David or we're going to the Situation Room and we are going to have this discussion in front of the President of the United States?" I don't know why it didn't happen. It would have been better in retrospect had it happened. They're all honorable people. It may very well be that what Condi Rice was the way she was managing it was exactly what the President wanted. I don't know, I know she had a very close relationship with the President and that was one of her strengths. He had a lot of confidence in her. She dealt with him every day, hours every day and we didn't. We were out running departments and doing what we do, Colin Powell and I. Like Afghanistan. And totally different sets of responsibilities. But from where I was sitting, my impression is that when I met with the President it seemed to me he was perfectly willing to make decisions. If you served them up and there were different opinions, he would say "well let's do this instead of that." He was very comfortable making decisions. Okay. But some things just did not get served up to him that way. Last question I promise about the notion of the function of the administration, how decisions got made. And let me ask in the guise of giving you two quotations from Known and Unknown. I hardly need to keep holding this up since you're already number one on the New York Times best seller list, but I'll do it, I'll do it. An August 2002 memo from you to Condoleeza Rice that you excerpt in this book and that is undoubtedly in full on your website. You to Condoleeza Rice It sometimes happens that a matter mentioned at an NSC meeting is said to have been decided because it elicited no objection. That is not a good practice. Also from Known and Unknown you in your own words While President Bush and I had many discussions about war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision. Not one person in NSC meetings at which I was present stated or hinted that they were opposed to the decision. I took it that Bush assumed as I did that each of us had reached the same conclusion. So you really let Condi have it, because important decisions weren't discussed, weren't made explicitly and yet the President, we're just assuming Page 9 of 16

10 I did not let Condi have it at all. I said "look, when whoever is doing the minutes of these meetings, it would be a mistake to assume something was agreed to unless it was raised as an issue and discussed and agreed to. Simply because something was mentioned and then not commented on, ought not to be taken as assent." That is what the first thing means. The second thing is disconnected from that and it basically was people have suggested that certain people in the NSC were for the war or against the war. I never heard anyone in the NSC express an opinion for or against it. I don't remember the President asking Colin Powell or Condi Rice or the Vice President or me. That's just a fact. Here is a question. Lord knows I am not challenging you on the facts. I am trying to understand, I am groping for lessons here. Would it have been better if the President had asked? I guess what I am saying is I don't think he needed to. In these decisions where is the President of the United States? Why is he permitting this jostling to take place? There wasn't jostling. Well between you and Colin Powell and Paul Bremer. There are always differences of opinion. There's nothing wrong with that. And that was at a perfectly acceptable level. It's happened as you said between Kissinger and Bill Rogers or Kissinger and Schlesinger and Schultz and Weinberger and Brzezinski and Vance; there is nothing wrong with that having differences of opinion you would expect that in a National Security Council. The thing though is to have those discussions and have them presented in a way that is orderly and have them decided. To the extent they drift, they tend to be fought out in the press by people two and three and four layers down. To the extent something can be crystallized and brought to the President and decided, then people salute and say fine. From the West Wing back to the Pentagon, 24 years and some months after your first tour of duty at the Pentagon, you return and this is pre-9/11, I am stepping this back to before 9/11 you take it as your mission to produce defense transformation. This is the term of art and you quote. I did not take it as my mission. The President gave a speech in the campaign at the Citadel. He said precisely what he wanted. When he asked me to come in to the Pentagon he said that is what I want you to do. Page 10 of 16

11 You accepted the commission from the President. Exactly. Now you are talking. And we've got, I am quoting from the speech, the President s speech Our heavy forces must be lighter, our light forces must be more lethal, all must be easier to deploy. This starts before 9/11 but you're in office for some six years. How much progress were you able to make. Oh enormous, enormous. Tell us, describe that. I would be happy to. Just if nothing else happened, movement from the Division Army structure to the Combat Brigade, the Brigade Combat teams, is enormous. And it enables our country to do things we couldn't even begin to do under the Division structure. And make me as a layman understand why? Well you are able to move around and almost interchange as replaceable elements that are fully capable that are much smaller rather than, if you want something, anything smaller than a division, you had to take it out of the division and then take the logistics and all the support capability with it which leaves the rest of it useless. So it is enormous what Pete Schoomaker, General Schoomaker did. Second, the growing use of and capability of UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, are not an accident. We put beef behind that and we increased the number and capabilities of those weapon systems enormously. And today, as a result we have a capability that we did not even begin to have. We had gone through eight or 10 years where the Defense Department had been drawn down and the intelligence community. I should also add that, I mean we criticize the intelligence community; they had their budgets reduced and that called the bathtub. The end of the Cold War, oh we can relax it is the end of history, lets draw down. And then comes 9/11 and what do we have to deal with. We have to deal with what we were left with what had happened in the preceding decade during the drawdown. Now, third, Special Forces, when I came in we immediately began strengthening our Special Forces, increasing the numbers, adjusting the assignments they have and taking some of their lower tier assignments and assigning them to the regular forces, conventional forces. We increased their equipment enormously. We increased their authorities enormously and here we are in a world, the Twenty-first Century Page 11 of 16

12 And you did that fast, because by Afghanistan, which happens right away, it is months after you take office, by Afghanistan you have units on the ground that obviously had an enormous amount of room for making their own decisions; their own maneuver, calling in air strikes and so forth. But today the Special Forces of the United States of America are enormously capable and represent a significant asset for our country. The Surge. Last big topic for which we'll have time alas. What does it say about the Pentagon, again what is the lesson here that the Surge is developed pretty largely, Frederick Kagan who is at the American Enterprise Institute; Jack Keane who by then is a retired Army Chief of Staff Vice. Excuse me Vice Chief of Staff. He is retired from the Pentagon. What does it say that the Surge which the President of the United States announces in January, 2007 has to come from outside the Pentagon? Well, we surged if you will, increased by some five, 10, 15,000 troops several times earlier. The question is why did what the President did, and God Bless him for doing it, have the effect it had. And I think there are several answers to that question. I was a latecomer to the Surge. Skeptical or? Well I was working with the military people and we talked and there was no one who was recommending that coming up the chain of command in the second half of I was constantly you go to the website you will see memo after memo where I say to people, do we need more troops; do we need fewer troops; should the troops be doing something differently. Asking these questions over and over again. Now, no one was recommending that we Surge coming up in the military chain. Hadley and Crouch in the White House. Steve Hadley was National Security. National Security Adviser and Crouch was the Deputy. Began this process and I will tell you why it worked. I thought about it a great deal and I must say I have enormous respect for President Bush deciding to do what he did. But, the reason Surging did not help earlier and did help in the last half of 2006, early 2007 is this essentially. First of all, it's not just the number of troops it is what they are doing. What is their role on the ground and I think that the military commander, Petraeus, fashioned a role that made sense for that moment. Second, Sadr for some reason went quiet. Page 12 of 16

13 We don't know why. No, stopped making mischief. Third, Maliki s government was maturing and he demonstrated it by going into the south and actually going after some of the dissidents which was a good sign. Fourth, Petraeus had been in charge of organizing and training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. And we had gotten up to over 300,000 I think is the number by the time you got to late They were then for the first time really in a position to cooperate with our military and help out. Then there is something that's not metaphysical, but psychological. The center of gravity by then had migrated almost away from Iraq towards the United States. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader said we'd lost the war. Oh I see the center... And the Congress was about ready to cut the funds off. So you had before I go to that, go back one other thing I did not mention was there was an awakening among the Sunnis. They got tired of the al-qaeda, the al-qaeda were raping their families; they were taking their businesses and the Sunnis started saying "well we can have a role in the new Iraq and we're tired of al-qaeda, we do not want them." So that added to all of these other things that came together to make the Surge work. Now what else happened? When the President boldly did what he did, and Jack Keane And now it is just the Surge in January. Jack Keane did have a role in that. There is no question about that. But what happened was it galvanized opinion in the United States. Here was a President that was not looking for a way out; he was looking for a way to win. And that told the people in the country like magnetic particles, oh, gosh there is a leader there. And that made the ones who were like Biden wanted to divide the country of Iraq into three parts and what s his name, Reid said we'd lost. It also galvanized opinion in Iraq. If you think about it, remember magnetic particles and you use a magnet. All of a sudden things started pointing. If people don't know what is going to happen in Iraq, should they be supporting the government of Iraq? Well if they're not going to win, Page 13 of 16

14 if the United States is going to pull out, why should they? And then President Bush comes out and says by golly, we are going to put more troops in and we are going to win this thing. And all the magnetic particles started pointing towards the Maliki government. It had a very positive psychological effect. This strikes me as a very important question. I am not sure I can formulate it very tightly or well, but, the question is so the Surge in your view was not a matter of finally getting it right? Oh no. All kinds of so let me just put it to you in a counter factual. Last point on the Surge if David Petraeus had been commander on the ground from the get go, what would have been different? Well, we might not have had the Iraqi security forces trained and equipped as well as they were because that is what he was first he was a division leader and he did a very good job. Then he trained and equipped. Now I don't know the answer to that question. That is a road we did not go down. But the idea that if you have a hammer and everything is a nail, so there are certain people say "oh more troops that is the answer." It was not the answer, there were lots of things that came together to make that work. I think it is, I discuss it in the book at some length, I think that the documentation I have supplied on the website supports that and I think it was a brilliant act by President George W. Bush and he deserves a lot of credit for it. All right, last question. We are running out of time, darn it. Again in the nature of a lesson New York Times Friday, this past Friday as we sit here speaking, has a story on the speech that Secretary of Defense, your immediate successor Robert Gates gave at West Point. I have not had a chance to read it carefully. Okay, no, no I don't doubt it, let me just if you do not want to touch this question then we will set it aside, but let me ask the question. It is just a quotation from the New York Times Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan. Now quotes Secretary Gates In my opinion any future Defense Secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land Army to Asia or the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined. Yeah. How do you. Page 14 of 16

15 I don't know of any Secretary that did advise him to do that. Fair enough. For an opener. Second, I think Secretary Gates is doing generally a good job. Third, I don't know what the article said. First of all You haven't read the speech. Let's stipulate that. Just because it is in the newspaper doesn't make it so. We know that. The reality is that I don't believe we have the ability in our country and I wrote a thing called Guidelines for Using Military Force in March of '01 and it is on the website. In it I say there are certain things we are not capable of doing. And we have to have a reasonable assessment of what we can do and what we can't do militarily. And I don't believe we can nation build. I just don't think we do it. The cultures are different around the world; the histories are different; the circumstances are different and you don't want to create dependencies on the part of other people. We can encourage them. We can wish them well. We can give them a chance and I think Afghanistan and Iraqi people have a chance at having reasonably good futures as they move towards representative systems of governments and could even be a model in the region. Actually, I said that countries. But, I don't know anyone who's suggesting putting large forces in those All right. Thinking they could nation build for them because I don't believe we can. Let me flip the question. This truly will be the last question. It is a question about the Untied States and what we are capable of. As a question of political will in our institutions, Korean War: 33,000 deaths and an ambiguous outcome, the peninsula is divided to this day. Vietnam: 55,000 American deaths and we lost. Iraq: fewer than 5,000 deaths, every one of them to be regretted obviously, but by historical standards that's a small number. We projected our power halfway across the world and within a matter of single digit number of years, there is a new government that has a chance that is now democratic and has a chance of making a go at it as a democratic nation. I would argue that by historical standards there's a pretty good case to be made that that represents a stunning success and yet you go on and get interviewed about Known and Unknown by Andrea Mitchell and John everybody is treating you like some sort of villain. How come? Where is the hostility? Why does the nation fail to appreciate what took place? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't tell you what is in the minds of the people who interview me. I think if anyone goes into the website and looks at what actually took Page 15 of 16

16 place, what were the decisions; what were the arguments; what were the issues; what were the pros and cons, they'll learn that much of the narrative that is out there is quite different from what actually happened by the people who were there and were involved in it. And I think that's a useful thing. I also think that you need time to pass over things to get perspective. And we're fighting and have been the first wars of the Twenty-first Century. There was not even television in World War II. What are we doing today, we have Facebook and Twitter and 24-hour news and s and Sony video cams. Everything happens like this and I do not think the inner gyroscopes of people have adjusted to the glut of information. A lie trips around the world three or four times while the truth is still getting its boots on as Mark Twain said I think. Right, right. What does that mean? Well it means that when somebody writes in Newsweek that somebody flushed a Koran down the toilet even though it never happened, riots occur in three cities and people are killed. And weeks later Newsweek writes, "oh if there was any portion of our article that was inaccurate, were sorry." The problem is the people are already dead that they are sorry for. Now, how do you deal with that? Well, we'll figure out a way as a people, we'll figure out a way. But we haven't yet and we are still adjusting to it, this enormous flood of information and glut that is on us at every moment. A lot of it which is not true, a lot of it just comes up and to get rebutted would take full time to rebut it. We will figure out a way. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, author of the New York Times number one best seller Known and Unknown thank you. Thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge I am Peter Robinson, thanks for joining us. Page 16 of 16