Friday, October 29, 2004
ARE THINGS really as ghastly as they appear this election year? President Bush is derided as a liar, brain-dead and a coward, not just by fringe groups but by prominent members of the Democratic establishment. Major intellectuals and artists lament that John Kerry won all three debates by skilled debating -- and yet gained little ground.
Even the wives and children are involved now. Kerry and his running mate John Edwards gratuitously broached the sexuality of Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter; his wife fired back that Kerry is not "a good man." And just when we got a brief respite, Teresa Heinz Kerry derided Laura Bush as never having a real job -- before apologizing that, yes, a decade at work in public school counts as real employment.
Third-party ads, fueled by the money of multimillionaires, imply that Kerry was also a coward and traitor and that Bush was AWOL. CBS News anchor Dan Rather is caught promulgating clearly forged documents, an ABC memo warns against the chimera of objectivity, and Sinclair Broadcast Group agrees to air only portions of a clearly partisan film after Democrats howled. There is no need to mention the conspiracy theories of "Fahrenheit 911," Teresa Heinz Kerry's "scumbag" and "shove it," or Dick Cheney's use of the F-word.
Meanwhile, the back-and-forth acrimony prompts thousands of lawyers to contest an election in advance, hoping to win through the courts should they fail in the popular vote or Electoral College. Unfounded rumors circulate about a renewed draft, the end of Social Security and even of big-shot conservative politicians crowding ahead of the more needy for flu shots.
Is our republic paralyzed with hate, about to experience a dreaded next stage of violence in the streets, akin to the last dark days of the Roman Republic when gangs stormed the forum? Not really.
There is a long history of similar American political invective. The elections of 1864 saw far worse slurs. Statesmen like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were routinely decried as savages, baboons and senile. For all the current name-calling, no one has accused either candidate of fathering illegitimate children, turning the country over to the Pope, or being intoxicated while on the job -- standard election year slander of the past. There are no riots in the streets, as was common in 1968.
Yet the true nature of our loud divisiveness is rarely remarked upon. In the last three decades, there has been a steady evolution from liberal to moderately conservative politics among a majority of the voters, whether gauged by the recent spate of Republican presidents or Bill Clinton's calculated shift to the center. Now the House, Senate, presidency and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are in Republican hands. A Bush win will ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.
In contrast, the universities, the arts, the major influential media and Hollywood are predominately liberal -- and furious. They bring an enormous amount of capital, talent, education and cultural influence into the political fray -- but continue to lose real political power. The talented elite plays the same role to the rest of America as the Europeans do to the United States -- venting and seething because the supposedly less sophisticated, but far more powerful, average Joes don't embrace their visions of utopia.
Elites from college professors and George Soros to Bruce Springsteen and Garrison Keillor believe that their underappreciated political insight is a natural byproduct of their own proven artistic genius, education, talent or capital. How then can a tongue-tied George W. Bush and his cronies so easily fool Americans, when novelists, actors, singers, comedians and venture capitalists have spent so much time and money warning them of their danger?
For all Sean Penn's rants, Rather's sermons, Michael Moore's mythodramas and Jon Stewart's postmodern snickers, America, even in times of a controversial war and rocky economy, is still not impressed. National Public Radio, "Nightline" and the New York Times are working overtime to assert their views in this philosophical debate; Jimmy Carter and Al Gore -- not George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole -- are fuming. Most Americans snore or flip the channel.
It is apparently a terrible thing to be sensitive, glib, smart, educated or chic -- and not be listened to, as we have seen from this noisy and often hysterical campaign among elites. That is the real divide in this country, and it is only going to get worse.
Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Even the wives and children are involved now. Kerry and his running mate John Edwards gratuitously broached the sexuality of Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter; his wife fired back that Kerry is not "a good man." And just when we got a brief respite, Teresa Heinz Kerry derided Laura Bush as never having a real job -- before apologizing that, yes, a decade at work in public school counts as real employment.
Third-party ads, fueled by the money of multimillionaires, imply that Kerry was also a coward and traitor and that Bush was AWOL. CBS News anchor Dan Rather is caught promulgating clearly forged documents, an ABC memo warns against the chimera of objectivity, and Sinclair Broadcast Group agrees to air only portions of a clearly partisan film after Democrats howled. There is no need to mention the conspiracy theories of "Fahrenheit 911," Teresa Heinz Kerry's "scumbag" and "shove it," or Dick Cheney's use of the F-word.
Meanwhile, the back-and-forth acrimony prompts thousands of lawyers to contest an election in advance, hoping to win through the courts should they fail in the popular vote or Electoral College. Unfounded rumors circulate about a renewed draft, the end of Social Security and even of big-shot conservative politicians crowding ahead of the more needy for flu shots.
Is our republic paralyzed with hate, about to experience a dreaded next stage of violence in the streets, akin to the last dark days of the Roman Republic when gangs stormed the forum? Not really.
There is a long history of similar American political invective. The elections of 1864 saw far worse slurs. Statesmen like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were routinely decried as savages, baboons and senile. For all the current name-calling, no one has accused either candidate of fathering illegitimate children, turning the country over to the Pope, or being intoxicated while on the job -- standard election year slander of the past. There are no riots in the streets, as was common in 1968.
Yet the true nature of our loud divisiveness is rarely remarked upon. In the last three decades, there has been a steady evolution from liberal to moderately conservative politics among a majority of the voters, whether gauged by the recent spate of Republican presidents or Bill Clinton's calculated shift to the center. Now the House, Senate, presidency and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are in Republican hands. A Bush win will ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.
In contrast, the universities, the arts, the major influential media and Hollywood are predominately liberal -- and furious. They bring an enormous amount of capital, talent, education and cultural influence into the political fray -- but continue to lose real political power. The talented elite plays the same role to the rest of America as the Europeans do to the United States -- venting and seething because the supposedly less sophisticated, but far more powerful, average Joes don't embrace their visions of utopia.
Elites from college professors and George Soros to Bruce Springsteen and Garrison Keillor believe that their underappreciated political insight is a natural byproduct of their own proven artistic genius, education, talent or capital. How then can a tongue-tied George W. Bush and his cronies so easily fool Americans, when novelists, actors, singers, comedians and venture capitalists have spent so much time and money warning them of their danger?
For all Sean Penn's rants, Rather's sermons, Michael Moore's mythodramas and Jon Stewart's postmodern snickers, America, even in times of a controversial war and rocky economy, is still not impressed. National Public Radio, "Nightline" and the New York Times are working overtime to assert their views in this philosophical debate; Jimmy Carter and Al Gore -- not George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole -- are fuming. Most Americans snore or flip the channel.
It is apparently a terrible thing to be sensitive, glib, smart, educated or chic -- and not be listened to, as we have seen from this noisy and often hysterical campaign among elites. That is the real divide in this country, and it is only going to get worse.
Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Is Iraq Better Off? Ask the Iraqis
By Steven E. Moore
Steven E. Moore is a Sacramento-based political consultant. A longer version of this article appears in the forthcoming issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Website: www.TheTruth AboutIraq
October 20, 2004
John Kerry is playing the prophet of doom in the most important foreign policy initiative of our generation. In Pennsylvania, Kerry described Iraq as "the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time." In New York, he opined that murderous cleric Muqtada Sadr "holds more sway in suburbs of Baghdad than Prime Minister [Iyad] Allawi." In Columbus, Ohio, the senator claimed to have a more accurate perspective on the situation in Iraq than did the interim prime minister, whose favorability rating of 73% among Iraqis, it's worth noting, is higher than Kerry's 48% favorability rating among Americans in the latest polls. Kerry, of course, has never set foot in Iraq.
I was there from July 2003 to April 2004, conducting about 70 focus groups and a dozen public opinion polls and advising L. Paul Bremer III, then the civilian administrator, on Iraqi public opinion. Whatever you might hear from Kerry, Michael Moore, the mainstream media and anyone else to whom defeating President Bush is more important than the fate of the Iraqi people, those who know best what's going on in Iraq — the Iraqis themselves — are optimistic about the future.
Iraqis consistently say in nationwide polls that the situation in their country is improving. In polls over the course of the summer, for example, more than half of Iraqis said their country was on the right track. The vast majority of Iraqis — 72% — see the same benefits in democracy as Americans do: the hope for peace, stability and a better life. Most polls show that 75% of Iraqis want to vote for their leaders rather than have clerics appoint them.
In a recent speech, Kerry charged that Saddam Hussein's brutality "was not, in itself, a reason to go to war." Iraqis disagree, as should any supporter of human rights. Nearly 55% of Iraqis say that toppling Hussein was worth the price of the current difficulties. These figures are easy to understand when you look at another set of numbers. In an Op-Ed article circulated this year among the more than 200 independent newspapers now published in Iraq, an Iraqi democratic activist observed that Hussein tortured and killed as many as 750,000 of his own people. Iraqis don't understand the debate about whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, Hussein was a weapon of mass destruction.
UNICEF, hardly an apologist for the Bush administration, estimates that 5,000 Iraqi children a month died of starvation and malnutrition while Hussein siphoned funds from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program to build his palaces and enrich French politicians.
Americans are only now learning of the extent of Hussein's corruption of this humanitarian program; the Iraqis have known about it for quite some time. When asked to rate their confidence in the U.N., Iraqis gave the organization a 2.9 on a scale of 1 to 4, with a 4 meaning absolutely no confidence. In contrast, more than 60% of Iraqis tell pollsters that the Iraqi government has done a good job since the June 28 hand-over.
Polling in Iraq is done much as in any developing country. Interviews are conducted face to face by highly trained Iraqi interviewers. For a 1,500-person sample, for instance, 75 qada (the Iraqi equivalent of precincts) would be chosen at random, with interviews conducted in 20 randomly chosen households in each.
Though difficulties abound, the cooperation rate is usually more than 80% — much higher than in the U.S. Iraqis are amazed that, for the first time, somebody cares about their political opinion, and they frequently want interviewers to interview cousins and friends.
From 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents, many from outside Iraq, are trying to prevent Iraqis who want democracy from achieving it. Kerry has said he would begin withdrawing U.S. troops six months after his inauguration. Iraq's autocratic neighbors are vigorously supporting the efforts of extremists to derail Iraqi self-government. Hastily withdrawing U.S. troops for political reasons would be a mistake for which we would pay for decades.
A look at the nightly news confirms the finding that six out of 10 Iraqis are worried about security, but what's being given short shrift are the strides being made and the intensity of Iraqi optimism.
By Steven E. Moore
Steven E. Moore is a Sacramento-based political consultant. A longer version of this article appears in the forthcoming issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Website: www.TheTruth AboutIraq
October 20, 2004
John Kerry is playing the prophet of doom in the most important foreign policy initiative of our generation. In Pennsylvania, Kerry described Iraq as "the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time." In New York, he opined that murderous cleric Muqtada Sadr "holds more sway in suburbs of Baghdad than Prime Minister [Iyad] Allawi." In Columbus, Ohio, the senator claimed to have a more accurate perspective on the situation in Iraq than did the interim prime minister, whose favorability rating of 73% among Iraqis, it's worth noting, is higher than Kerry's 48% favorability rating among Americans in the latest polls. Kerry, of course, has never set foot in Iraq.
I was there from July 2003 to April 2004, conducting about 70 focus groups and a dozen public opinion polls and advising L. Paul Bremer III, then the civilian administrator, on Iraqi public opinion. Whatever you might hear from Kerry, Michael Moore, the mainstream media and anyone else to whom defeating President Bush is more important than the fate of the Iraqi people, those who know best what's going on in Iraq — the Iraqis themselves — are optimistic about the future.
Iraqis consistently say in nationwide polls that the situation in their country is improving. In polls over the course of the summer, for example, more than half of Iraqis said their country was on the right track. The vast majority of Iraqis — 72% — see the same benefits in democracy as Americans do: the hope for peace, stability and a better life. Most polls show that 75% of Iraqis want to vote for their leaders rather than have clerics appoint them.
In a recent speech, Kerry charged that Saddam Hussein's brutality "was not, in itself, a reason to go to war." Iraqis disagree, as should any supporter of human rights. Nearly 55% of Iraqis say that toppling Hussein was worth the price of the current difficulties. These figures are easy to understand when you look at another set of numbers. In an Op-Ed article circulated this year among the more than 200 independent newspapers now published in Iraq, an Iraqi democratic activist observed that Hussein tortured and killed as many as 750,000 of his own people. Iraqis don't understand the debate about whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, Hussein was a weapon of mass destruction.
UNICEF, hardly an apologist for the Bush administration, estimates that 5,000 Iraqi children a month died of starvation and malnutrition while Hussein siphoned funds from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program to build his palaces and enrich French politicians.
Americans are only now learning of the extent of Hussein's corruption of this humanitarian program; the Iraqis have known about it for quite some time. When asked to rate their confidence in the U.N., Iraqis gave the organization a 2.9 on a scale of 1 to 4, with a 4 meaning absolutely no confidence. In contrast, more than 60% of Iraqis tell pollsters that the Iraqi government has done a good job since the June 28 hand-over.
Polling in Iraq is done much as in any developing country. Interviews are conducted face to face by highly trained Iraqi interviewers. For a 1,500-person sample, for instance, 75 qada (the Iraqi equivalent of precincts) would be chosen at random, with interviews conducted in 20 randomly chosen households in each.
Though difficulties abound, the cooperation rate is usually more than 80% — much higher than in the U.S. Iraqis are amazed that, for the first time, somebody cares about their political opinion, and they frequently want interviewers to interview cousins and friends.
From 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents, many from outside Iraq, are trying to prevent Iraqis who want democracy from achieving it. Kerry has said he would begin withdrawing U.S. troops six months after his inauguration. Iraq's autocratic neighbors are vigorously supporting the efforts of extremists to derail Iraqi self-government. Hastily withdrawing U.S. troops for political reasons would be a mistake for which we would pay for decades.
A look at the nightly news confirms the finding that six out of 10 Iraqis are worried about security, but what's being given short shrift are the strides being made and the intensity of Iraqi optimism.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Why I'm (Slightly) for Bushby CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The election season is always hellish for people who fancy that they live by political principles, because at such a time "politics" becomes, even more than usually, a matter of show business and superficial calculation. Ever since 1980, when I bet the liberals of New York that Reagan would win easily (and didn't have to buy my own lunch for months afterward), I have sympathized with the "prisoners' dilemma" that faces liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term "lesser evil" was evolved to deal with this very trap. Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don't really believe? Is it time for that deep-breath third-party vote, or even angry abstention, of the sort that has tortured some Nation readers ever since they just couldn't take Humphrey over Nixon? This magazine prints columnists who regularly describe the terms of the captivity with more emotion than I can now summon.
But absent from this triangular calculation is the irony of history. Do you know anybody who really, deeply wishes that Carter had been re-elected, or that Dukakis had won? Implicit but unstated, in the desire of the prisoner to escape, is the banal, unexciting assumption of our two-party oligopoly: Sometimes it's objectively not so bad that the "other" party actually wins. Thus I ought to begin by stating my reasons to hope for a Kerry/Edwards victory.
Given my underlying stipulation, which is that this is a single-issue election and that that is a good and necessary thing, I have no formal quarrel with the Kerry/Edwards platform. It ostensibly calls for military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad. It does not shade the moral distinction that has to be made between "our" imperfect civilization and those who want to turn Islamic society into a medieval but still-lethal dust bowl. (Not even by MoveOn.org are we being told, of the racist janjaweed death squads in Sudan, that they are the expression of pitiable, deep-seated Muslim grievances.) The Kerry camp also rightly excoriates the President and his Cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.
I can't wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words, about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and "at home" (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn't broken out "at home"). I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi's existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America's part. I notice that, given the ambivalent evidence about Saddam's weaponry, Kerry had the fortitude and common sense to make the presumption of guilt rather than innocence. I assume that he has already discerned the difference between criticizing the absence of postwar planning and criticizing the presence of an anti-Saddam plan to begin with. I look forward, in other words, to the assumption of his responsibility.
Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration. If the worst that is said of him is true--that he is an idiotic and psychically damaged Sabbath-fanatic, with nothing between his large Texan ears--then these things were presumably just as true when he ran against Al Gore, and against nation-building and foreign intervention. It is Bush's conversion from isolationism that impresses me, just as it is the parallel lapse into isolationism on Kerry's part that makes me skeptical. You don't like "smirking"? What about the endless smirks and smarmy hints about the Administration's difficulties, whether genuine or self-imposed? The all-knowing, stupid smirks about the "secular" Saddam, or the innocuousness of prewar Iraq? The sneers about the astonishing success of our forces in Afghanistan, who are now hypocritically praised by many who opposed their initial deployment? This is to say nothing of the paranoid innuendoes I don't have to name that are now part of pseudo-"radical" rumor-mongering and defamation. Whichever candidate wins, I shall live to see these smirks banished, at least.
I can visualize a Kerry victory, in other words (and can claim to have written one of the earliest essays calling attention to the merits of John Edwards). What slightly disturbs me about most liberals is their hypertense refusal to admit the corollary. "Anybody But Bush"--and this from those who decry simple-mindedness--is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it's nihilism at best. If it isn't treason to the country--let us by all means not go there--it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.
One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen. I am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House. An irony of history, in the positive sense, is when Republicans are willing to risk a dangerous confrontation with an untenable and indefensible status quo. I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause. In Kabul recently, I interviewed Dr. Masuda Jalal, a brave Afghan physician who was now able to run for the presidency. I asked her about her support for the intervention in Iraq. "For us," she said, "the battle against terrorism and against dictatorship are the same thing." I dare you to snicker at simple-mindedness like that.
I could obviously take refuge in saying that I was a Blair supporter rather than a Bush endorser, and I am in fact a member of a small international regime-change "left" that originates in solidarity with our embattled brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq, brave people who have received zero support from the American "antiwar" movement. I won't even consider any reconsideration, at least until Islamist websites start posting items that ask themselves, and not us: Can we go on taking such casualties? Have our tactics been too hideous and too stupid? Only then can anything like a negotiation begin. (Something somewhat analogous may be true, and I say it with agony, about the Israel-Palestine dispute, which stands a very slightly better chance of a decent settlement if an almost uncritically pro-Israeli Democrat is not elected.)
The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect, has been able to say, repeatedly and even repetitively, the essential thing: that we are involved in this war without apology and without remorse. He should go further, and admit the evident possibility of defeat--which might concentrate a few minds--while abjuring any notion of capitulation. Senator Kerry is also capable of saying this, but not without cheapening it or qualifying it, so that, in the Nation prisoners' dilemma, he is offering you the worst of both worlds. Myself, I have made my own escape from your self-imposed quandary. Believe me when I say that once you have done it, there's no going back. I have met a few other ex-hostages, and they all agree that the relief is unbelievable. I shall be meeting some of you again, I promise, and the fraternal paw will still be extended.
The election season is always hellish for people who fancy that they live by political principles, because at such a time "politics" becomes, even more than usually, a matter of show business and superficial calculation. Ever since 1980, when I bet the liberals of New York that Reagan would win easily (and didn't have to buy my own lunch for months afterward), I have sympathized with the "prisoners' dilemma" that faces liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term "lesser evil" was evolved to deal with this very trap. Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don't really believe? Is it time for that deep-breath third-party vote, or even angry abstention, of the sort that has tortured some Nation readers ever since they just couldn't take Humphrey over Nixon? This magazine prints columnists who regularly describe the terms of the captivity with more emotion than I can now summon.
But absent from this triangular calculation is the irony of history. Do you know anybody who really, deeply wishes that Carter had been re-elected, or that Dukakis had won? Implicit but unstated, in the desire of the prisoner to escape, is the banal, unexciting assumption of our two-party oligopoly: Sometimes it's objectively not so bad that the "other" party actually wins. Thus I ought to begin by stating my reasons to hope for a Kerry/Edwards victory.
Given my underlying stipulation, which is that this is a single-issue election and that that is a good and necessary thing, I have no formal quarrel with the Kerry/Edwards platform. It ostensibly calls for military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad. It does not shade the moral distinction that has to be made between "our" imperfect civilization and those who want to turn Islamic society into a medieval but still-lethal dust bowl. (Not even by MoveOn.org are we being told, of the racist janjaweed death squads in Sudan, that they are the expression of pitiable, deep-seated Muslim grievances.) The Kerry camp also rightly excoriates the President and his Cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.
I can't wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words, about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and "at home" (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn't broken out "at home"). I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi's existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America's part. I notice that, given the ambivalent evidence about Saddam's weaponry, Kerry had the fortitude and common sense to make the presumption of guilt rather than innocence. I assume that he has already discerned the difference between criticizing the absence of postwar planning and criticizing the presence of an anti-Saddam plan to begin with. I look forward, in other words, to the assumption of his responsibility.
Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration. If the worst that is said of him is true--that he is an idiotic and psychically damaged Sabbath-fanatic, with nothing between his large Texan ears--then these things were presumably just as true when he ran against Al Gore, and against nation-building and foreign intervention. It is Bush's conversion from isolationism that impresses me, just as it is the parallel lapse into isolationism on Kerry's part that makes me skeptical. You don't like "smirking"? What about the endless smirks and smarmy hints about the Administration's difficulties, whether genuine or self-imposed? The all-knowing, stupid smirks about the "secular" Saddam, or the innocuousness of prewar Iraq? The sneers about the astonishing success of our forces in Afghanistan, who are now hypocritically praised by many who opposed their initial deployment? This is to say nothing of the paranoid innuendoes I don't have to name that are now part of pseudo-"radical" rumor-mongering and defamation. Whichever candidate wins, I shall live to see these smirks banished, at least.
I can visualize a Kerry victory, in other words (and can claim to have written one of the earliest essays calling attention to the merits of John Edwards). What slightly disturbs me about most liberals is their hypertense refusal to admit the corollary. "Anybody But Bush"--and this from those who decry simple-mindedness--is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it's nihilism at best. If it isn't treason to the country--let us by all means not go there--it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.
One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen. I am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House. An irony of history, in the positive sense, is when Republicans are willing to risk a dangerous confrontation with an untenable and indefensible status quo. I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause. In Kabul recently, I interviewed Dr. Masuda Jalal, a brave Afghan physician who was now able to run for the presidency. I asked her about her support for the intervention in Iraq. "For us," she said, "the battle against terrorism and against dictatorship are the same thing." I dare you to snicker at simple-mindedness like that.
I could obviously take refuge in saying that I was a Blair supporter rather than a Bush endorser, and I am in fact a member of a small international regime-change "left" that originates in solidarity with our embattled brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq, brave people who have received zero support from the American "antiwar" movement. I won't even consider any reconsideration, at least until Islamist websites start posting items that ask themselves, and not us: Can we go on taking such casualties? Have our tactics been too hideous and too stupid? Only then can anything like a negotiation begin. (Something somewhat analogous may be true, and I say it with agony, about the Israel-Palestine dispute, which stands a very slightly better chance of a decent settlement if an almost uncritically pro-Israeli Democrat is not elected.)
The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect, has been able to say, repeatedly and even repetitively, the essential thing: that we are involved in this war without apology and without remorse. He should go further, and admit the evident possibility of defeat--which might concentrate a few minds--while abjuring any notion of capitulation. Senator Kerry is also capable of saying this, but not without cheapening it or qualifying it, so that, in the Nation prisoners' dilemma, he is offering you the worst of both worlds. Myself, I have made my own escape from your self-imposed quandary. Believe me when I say that once you have done it, there's no going back. I have met a few other ex-hostages, and they all agree that the relief is unbelievable. I shall be meeting some of you again, I promise, and the fraternal paw will still be extended.
Monday, October 25, 2004
Courage and Freedom": Address at Warsaw University
Remarks as Delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Warsaw, Poland, Tuesday, October 5, 2004.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you, Mr. Rector. Actually, on a personal note, my father was born in Warsaw and he was a mathematician. He would say that the saddest part of that introduction is that I went from mathematics—which is a real science—to political science.
I’m going to—if you indulge me—make one try at a little bit of Polish, but I promise you I won’t extend it: Polska – to kraj, dla ktorego mam duzy szacunek i wielka sympatie. [Poland is a country for which I have high respect and much affinity.] [Applause]
And indeed as I was thinking, if I had to give a title to these remarks, I think there is a theme and it just kind of emerges from the subject matter. The theme is: courage and freedom. And for me, most recently, it starts up at West Point, where the U.S. Military Academy is located.
I think for many of you, you know that one Polish hero has really become a legend in America, that’s Tadeusz Kosciuszko. You may or may not know that he organized the defense of West Point, which George Washington said was “the key to the revolution.” He wasn’t the only Pole who was there in our revolution. Americans also remember General Casimir Pulaski who died from wounds he suffered in the Battle of Savannah in 1779. Two years before his death, Pulaski told Benjamin Franklin: “We Poles have a hatred for all forms of tyranny, especially foreign tyranny. So no matter where in this world someone is fighting for freedom, we feel it is a personal matter to us as well.” That was a Polish general more than two hundred years ago.
But that tradition of courage in defense of freedom distinguished Poland in the 20th century as well. We remember the important role that Polish pilots played in the Battle of Britain and the daring of Polish soldiers who captured the seemingly impregnable fortress of Monte Cassino in Italy.
We remember the heroes of the Polish resistance, people like Jan Nowak, who risked his life to travel from Warsaw to Stockholm and London to try to enlist support to save Poland from Stalin’s postwar designs. His 1982 memoir entitled “Courier from Warsaw” closes by recalling his friends who gave their lives in the Second World War. He concludes with a fervent expression of hope for the future of Poland; he writes: “One day the sun will shine on crowds of singing and dancing people drunk with joy in the streets of Warsaw. The free soul of Poland will survive until that day.” And I might add, on a personal note, we had a chance to see the heart of Warsaw on a beautiful, sunny day. And, indeed, his prediction has come true.
We Americans fondly remember Lech Walesa and Solidarity, who proved to the world 20 years ago that the free soul of Poland still survived. Their courage helped to bring about the extraordinarily peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.
And even non-Catholics in my country have the deepest respect for the Polish spiritual leader and peacemaker, Pope John Paul II. “Freedom is given to man by God,” the Pope has said, “as a measure of his dignity.” And, “as children of God we cannot be slaves.”
This year, as you all know, marks the 60th anniversary of one of the 20th century’s most courageous stands against the slavery of Nazi occupation. And today, we had a chance to lay a wreath at the monument to the Warsaw Uprising. We remember how Warsaw was burned and torn apart once again, brick by brick, because her people wanted to be free.
And even when Poland was overcome by the evil of Soviet totalitarianism, the cherished dream of freedom still burned in the hearts of the Polish people. Winston Churchill once said of Poland that, despite its long bondage over more than a century, occupying powers had been “unable,” as he said, “to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible and that she will rise again like a rock which may, for a time, be submerged by a tidal wave but which remains a rock.”
Poles were rock-like in their conviction that freedom and justice would be theirs again one day. Today, Poles are free. And now, just as in the early days of my country, brave Americans and Poles are once again working and fighting side by side to bring freedom to nations where liberty has long been held captive.
Three years ago, President Bush came to this university and he spoke of the iron will of the Polish people. “Here you have proven,” he said, “that communism need not be followed by chaos, that great oppression can end in true reconciliation, and that the promise of freedom is stronger than the habit of fear.”
Indeed, Poland stands as a new leader of Europe. Poland’s leadership is marked by courage and belief in freedom, and strengthened by painful lessons of history.
Poles understand, perhaps better than anyone, the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes. And yes, I do include Saddam Hussein.
For Poland, September 1, 1939 is a date that lives in infamy. But, as you know, there was much that preceded Hitler’s tanks into Poland’s frontier.
In 1935, Britain and France acquiesced to Germany’s abrogation of its disarmament obligations. In 1936, Hitler ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland, betting correctly that the world’s hollow warnings formed weak defenses. When he annexed Austria in 1938, the world again sat by. When he marched into Prague later that same year, the world sat still once again. And finally when the world warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, he assumed that this warning was just as empty as all the ones that had come before. Poland and the world paid for it with the worst war in history.
But, Poland’s ordeal did not end with the end of that war. For Poland, it began four decades of Soviet occupation. And yet despite all of that tragedy, democracy flourishes in Poland—after a journey of courage and determination whose difficulties only Poles can truly comprehend, but which Americans deeply admire.
Many people hoped that the Cold War’s end would bring a long period of unbroken peace. But September 11, 2001 gave us another rude awakening. We were face to face once again with the ugly reality that evil didn’t simply disappear with the demise of Hitler and Stalin. The cold-blooded murder of 3,000 innocent souls—from America and Poland and many other countries—on that September day once again put us in the middle of a war that we didn’t look for. And once again, the target is freedom itself.
Fortunately, we confront these dangers with a new set of allies. And in response to the extraordinary threat posed by international terrorism, NATO has a new sense of purpose. In this global fight, NATO can rightly claim its own historic contributions. For the first time in NATO’s history, Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty was invoked, of all things, to defend the United States. NATO AWACS airplanes patrolled American skies. NATO support for the International Security Force in Afghanistan helped ensure the stability and neutrality of that country’s capital. And the NATO contribution to Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan is enabling the Afghan government to expand its authority, making the country more peaceful, stable and secure.
And this Saturday, Afghans, for what I believe is the first time in their history, will hold a national election for their president—an election for which 10.6 million people have registered to vote, forty percent of them women, despite intimidation and threats from the Taliban. It is quite an achievement.
The NATO alliance remains as vital to our national security today as it was in the Cold War. It’s true of Europe as well. The menace of terrorism, I believe, threatens all of us. No one can fight it alone. Only together can we defeat the challenge—the particularly dangerous challenge—posed by the intersection of weapons of mass terror, terrorist organizations, and state support for terrorism.
I remember I was working in the U.S. Defense Department for a Secretary of Defense named Richard Cheney when the Berlin Wall came down. Many questioned whether NATO was necessary anymore. I still remember the first press conference that President George H.W. Bush—we call him “41”; he was the forty-first president of the United States. In his first press conference after the Wall came down, he was asked why we need NATO, now that the threat had gone away. President Bush answered, the threat is “uncertainty,” the threat is “instability.” And some people laughed at that answer, but it was a wise answer.
The intervening years have demonstrated its wisdom. Indeed, new threats did emerge in Europe, particularly in the Balkans—indeed, the worst crimes against humanity since the demise of Hitler. And ultimately NATO proved to be the only really effective instrument for dealing with this new threat to European stability and for opposing genocide and tyranny.
When Poland and other new democracies of Central Europe gained their freedom after more than four decades of Soviet tyranny, there were some who said it would be dangerous and destabilizing to welcome these newly-free countries into NATO.
I am personally proud of having worked for Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense—he was probably the first senior American to recognize that bringing Poland and other Central European countries into NATO was in both the strategic and moral interests of the United States and Europe.
And indeed, Polish membership in NATO has provided your country with the assurances it deserves that Poland’s hard-won freedom will be protected. But also, despite those predictions that it would cause instability or create a new dividing line down the center of Europe—remember those phrases—Polish membership in NATO instead has seen Poland take the lead in promoting stability and progress in Europe and helped lead the way for nine other new members in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
By remaining true to its founding vision of a Europe whole, free, and undivided, NATO has shown that an alliance based on a belief in freedom has more staying power than any alliance in history. And for this reason, the United States and Poland have worked hard together to modernize and strengthen NATO.
Some people are concerned that our attention might be totally absorbed by Afghanistan and Iraq. But that is not the case.
To the contrary, we have streamlined and modernized the Alliance’s command structure to make it better prepared for the 21st century. We have established Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk to lead U.S. and European militaries into this new world. We have established the NATO Response Force, elements of which are already serving together in Afghanistan. And the recently established NATO Chemical Biological Nuclear and Radiological Battalion, CBNR, as we like to call it. The NATO CBNR Battalion led by the Czech Republic has contributed to real world operations assisting with security during the Athens Olympics.
It’s particularly important to extend the values that NATO stands for to the whole of Europe. Our objective of a Europe whole and free will not be complete until Ukraine is a full-fledged member of Europe. As President Bush said here in Warsaw, ”We must extend our hand to Ukraine, as Poland has done with such determination.” And few countries have more to offer to assist reform in Ukraine than Poland. In the same way, we must continue trying to build a bridge to Belarus, whose people are denied freedom by an authoritarian dictator.
President Bush came to Warsaw in 2001, and it was here that he launched his campaign for helping ensure the Alliance’s continuing vitality and relevancy—through further NATO enlargement.
With the addition of Hungary and the Czech Republic and Poland, NATO is enriched. And it’s been strengthened further by the addition of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. These newly free countries understand the difficult journey to democracy. With Poland, they can stand as powerful beacons for emerging democracies—in Europe and now, hopefully, in the Middle East, and Central and South Asia.
Poland has quickly moved from being a new member of NATO to being an important NATO leader—a tribute to the courage and commitment that we Americans have long admired about our Polish friends.
And as President Bush has highlighted again and again, Poland is important in keeping a strong transatlantic link, as a member of the EU as well.
Freedom has been the glue of the world’s strongest alliances and freedom has been the solvent that has dissolved tyrannical rule. It has held NATO allies together over the course of four decades of often-contentious debates. And it brought some 40 countries into the coalition effort in Afghanistan, some 30 countries into Iraq and 80 or 90 countries into the larger coalition against global terror.
After the tragedy of September 11th, President Bush recognized that the world could no longer live with ambiguity. Every country, he said, has to make a choice. We could no longer continue living with states that sponsor terrorism, states that have the potential to put the world’s worst weapons in the hands of terrorists.
The Taliban, operating under the guise of religion, chose the terrorists. As a result, they have joined the Soviets and the Nazis on the ash heap of history.
Qaddafi was given a choice. He saw the success of the Coalition’s military in the region and he chose to stop violating his international obligations and to peacefully dismantle his weapons programs.
Saddam Hussein also had a choice. As a matter of fact, it was a choice he had been confronted with in 17 successive U.N. resolutions over the course of 12 years: not to threaten his neighbors, not to support terrorism, not to commit genocide against his own people. He had been warned not to interfere with the flights that were monitoring his compliance. He had finally been warned to declare fully and completely all of his programs for weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems and to stop interfering with U.N. inspections.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was his 17th—and supposed to be his final—chance. Saddam Hussein chose defiance. He chose to continue to hide his activities from inspectors. He chose to continue to support terrorism. And he continued to torture his country and his people in a way that puts him among the most brutal tyrants of the last hundred years.
Perhaps Saddam Hussein hoped that we would turn a blind eye to his choices, just as other nations had done at other times in history, and most dramatically and tragically in the 1930’s.
Maybe he wagered that what one writer has called “the density of evil” that permeated Iraq would go unnoticed. Or maybe he thought other nations just didn’t care, or cared more about their commercial interests. In any case, he chose wrong. And free nations said: the evil had to stop.
The depth of that evil is so alien to the experience of most people, it’s necessary to talk about it—not simply to talk about the past or to explain why this war was necessary, but to talk about the present and the future and to understand what it is that Iraqis have to overcome.
They are now trying to cast off a smothering blanket of fear, a blanket of fear woven by 35 years of the most brutal kind of repression, where even the smallest mistake could mean torture or death, or punishments worse than death. Yes, there are punishments worse than death—like fathers or mothers being forced to watch their children tortured or killed.
Poles have an ability to appreciate far better than Americans how that kind of blanket of fear can distort the behavior of even perfectly decent human beings. Perhaps you also understand that that sort of fear is not something that can be cast off immediately and simply forgotten—particularly not when the people who inflicted that fear are still at large and killing people.
Saddam began weaving that terrible blanket from the very beginning. In 1979, one of his first acts as President of Iraq was to conduct a sweeping purge of top Baathist Party leaders. He held a meeting of the Iraqi National Assembly, and with pretend tears in his eyes, Saddam talked about how a senior party member had confessed his disloyalty. As he named other guilty colleagues, guards dragged them, one by one, out of the meeting. Saddam then asked his ministers and top party leaders for their first test of loyalty. He made them participate in the firing squads that executed their former colleagues.
But, that wasn’t enough for Saddam—no. He had videotapes made of that event and sent to leaders throughout the Middle East, so that his neighbors would know just what kind of leader they were dealing with. Saddam was the head of an internationally recognized government, but he acted more like a vicious gangland boss.
Videotaped torture was, in fact, common. One American writer who recently viewed some of these tapes described Saddam’s thugs chopping off hands, fingers and tongues, so-called Fedayeen Saddam ruthlessly breaking the arms of a comrade who failed to carry out orders. Of these images this American writer wrote: “They are the sort that no civilized person wants another to see.”
On one of my trips to Iraq, I saw the forked trunk of a dead tree behind the police Academy in Baghdad. On each branch of the tree, the bark is permanently marked by what had been two sets of ropes: one set, high enough to tie up a man; the shorter set, to tie up a woman. Our guide told us about horrific things that happened to the men and women who were tied to that tree.
Just beyond the torture tree was a gate to the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee which, as some of you may know, was headed by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s most evil son. Sometimes at night, Uday would come to personally torture and abuse prisoners. And while we were on a trip through Northern Iraq last year, one commander told us that workers had temporarily stopped the excavation of a newly discovered mass grave, after unearthing the remains of 80 women and children—some still with little dresses and toys.
Permit me one more: In the south, we visited a small village of the Marsh Arabs. We had to travel over a man-made desert the size of the state of New Jersey—a desert created by Saddam in order to exterminate these people. The Marsh Arabs are one of the oldest civilizations in the world going back several thousand years. But the marshes around which their whole livelihood and civilization have been based, had been destroyed. After 35 years of this kind of genocidal repression, a population of half a million has been reduced to somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000.
When we got to the small village, children came and greeted us with cheers of “Salaam Bush,” and in Arabic—which I don’t know, but was translated—“Down with Saddam.” And they reached out their hands, and they weren’t asking for candy, they weren’t asking for toys, just a single word: “Water?”
During the Cold War, some people argued about this part of the world that at least the Soviet Union provided stability. I think you and Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as “the stability of the graveyard.”
Well, the so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was something even worse. Beyond the genocidal murders, he systematically destroyed Iraq—building palaces, while the infrastructure decayed beyond repair, starving his people while stealing money from the UN’s Oil for Food program, and exporting terrorism, inciting terrorism and funding terrorism.
From the very first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Poland has fought side by side with America to halt these evil and horrific crimes against humanity.
The tragedy of World War II came about, in part, because people in my country believed that the Atlantic Ocean provided a wall behind which the United States could hide from the tragedy that was about to engulf Europe. Today I think there are some people who believe that they might escape the scourge of terrorism by building a high enough wall around their country—but that’s an illusion.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Poland’s Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski put it correctly. He said: “By taking part in this operation in Iraq we are proving that we properly understand the nature of modern threats and the philosophy of counteracting them. Now, thanks in part to us, the world is safer, we are safer. Today,” he said, “the war is never far away, and no one’s home is safe. We will not close ourselves off and we will not hide from danger behind any wall.”
Minister Szmajdzinski is right. We cannot hide behind walls. And no one is truly safe from the threat we face.
Our enemies know us by our love of life and democracy. We know them by their worship of death and their philosophy of despair. Earlier this year, we were given a window into that dark and hopeless world when we intercepted a letter from an al Qaeda associate in Iraq to his colleagues in Afghanistan. That letter from a man who’s, unfortunately, become very well-known to the world, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggests how terrorists view the benefits of a free and open society in the Middle East. “Democracy” in Iraq “is coming,” Zarqawi wrote. That, he said, will mean “suffocation” for the terrorists.
He talks with contempt about Iraqis who, in his words, “look ahead to a sunny tomorrow, a prosperous future, a carefree life, comfort and favor.” His letter is available on the Internet. Read it. I think you will see that the contempt Zarqawi displays for whole groups of human beings—including Christians and Jews, but also Muslim Shia and Muslim Kurds—calls to mind the racism of the Nazis.
When Zarqawi claims credit for bombs that kill innocent civilians and innocent children, he doesn’t care what religion they happen to be. You will see that his glorification of death and violence calls to mind the tyrannical movements of the last century. Zarqawi and bin Laden and others like them may claim the mantle of religion, but their rhetoric is more reminiscent of the death’s head of Hitler’s SS.
They may profess to be religious, but they teach that destruction is good, murder is noble, that killing innocents, even children, will earn the murderer paradise—despite the fact that Islam condemns murder and suicide. They use mosques as part of their terror campaign, and desecrate Muslim holy places. And they say that their ultimate goal is God’s greater glory, but what they truly glorify is murder. Their ultimate goal is raw power. That is not religion. That is totalitarian ideology.
And that is the point where terrorists and Saddamists converge. Their long-term goals may differ, but their immediate goal is the same—to use fear and terror to prevent the emergence of a free Iraq. They have nothing positive to offer, only death and destruction. They play on fears of a population that has been terrorized for 35 years—and, in some cases, by the same people who are killing today.
That is the heart of the reason why this fight continues to be difficult. But it is also the great weakness of the enemies we are fighting. Because they offer nothing positive, most Iraqis would like to see them defeated. And more and more Iraqis are stepping up to fight them.
The majority of the Iraqis know that whether terrorists and Saddamists actively work together or not, the efforts of one support the other. With each life claimed by an indiscriminate attack, with each act of sabotage of Iraq’s infrastructure, with each barbaric beheading, our enemies define themselves in vivid contrast to the goal of a free Iraq.
Our objective is to build up Iraq. Our enemies want to finish Saddam’s work and tear Iraq down. Iraqis want to live in safety and freedom to pursue their own happiness. Terrorists target Iraqis who simply go about their daily lives. Iraqis want free and fair elections. Terrorists desperately target each step of that process. We build schools. They kill children.
But despite their savagery, Iraqis are moving forward with great courage. Even though they know they’re risking their lives in doing so, thousands of Iraqis continue to join the army, the national guard and the police force. A fact that is not sufficiently known or appreciated is that more than 700 Iraqis in the police, in the army and national guard, have already given their lives in this fight for a free Iraq. And they are led by courageous leaders, who are no strangers to being targets of terror.
Prime Minister Allawi, who is known to all the world, knows what it’s like to have a price on his head. Even in exile, he wasn’t safe. In 1979, he was sleeping in his apartment in London when he woke just in time to move his head out of the way of an ax wielded by one of Saddam’s assassins. The ax nearly took his leg off. He spent a year in the hospital. He was the target of two or three more assassination attempts. He knows what it is to put your life on the line. His deputy prime minister has been the target of assassination attempts. Indeed, every senior official in the Iraqi government, every governor in Iraq, every police chief, and many, many others know they are risking their lives every day. But they continue to do so. And it’s not just the leaders; it’s ordinary citizens as well.
When we visited Fallujah this past June, I met a U.S. Marine whose life had been saved by five brave members of the Iraqi National Guard. Two of them had risked their own lives to pull him off the battlefield under enemy fire. They received the Navy commendation medal with valor for their actions.
And one that has really stuck with me was a young woman we met in Northern Iraq, who was working as an interpreter. Her sister had been murdered a few weeks before. A member of my party asked her, “Why do you continue to work with us?” And she said very simply, “My father said, ‘You must never back down in the face of evil.’”
Iraqis are not backing down. And they have the support of extraordinarily brave coalition partners.
Indeed, Polish soldiers in Iraq have shown the same courage and commitment to freedom that Casimir Pulaski spoke about to Ben Franklin 200 years ago. We mourn with Poland the sacrifice of 17 soldiers and civilians in this noble fight for freedom. Every life lost in this cause is precious, and we can honor their memory by ensuring that their sacrifice is not in vain.
When the time came to take action in Iraq, 34 countries contributed troops, including nine of NATO’s new members. But Poland stood out as one of the four countries that sent troops into combat on the very first day. Polish Special Forces helped to capture oil platforms in the Shatt al-Arab that had explosives onboard, but that had not been rigged to cause destruction.
And, as I think you are familiar with, Poland has taken command of one of the most diverse military units ever assembled: a 10,000-man division of soldiers from 21 countries who speak 17 different languages. On my visits to Iraq, I have been privileged to meet the first Polish commander of that multinational division, Maj. Gen. Tyszkiewicz, as well as his successor Maj. Gen. Bienek. They are both impressive officers, and I hear that the current commander, Maj. Gen Ekiert, is so as well.
Last October, when I met Maj. Gen. Tyszkiewicz in Hilla, where he was responsible for an area called the Shia heartland, which is about one-quarter the size of your country—a huge area of responsibility, and a huge mission—he told me that when Iraqis come to him to complain about electricity shortages and unemployment, he tells them about the challenges that Poland faced after throwing off the Soviet yoke. I think what may be one of the reasons that Poles are doing so well in this delicate mission is that they understand better than most what Iraqis are facing. What they can also tell them, as Gen. Tyszkiewicz did, is that Poles did not lose heart, that you have made continuous progress, and that you are incomparably better off than you were under a tyrannical rule.
Poles have credibility when you say that it’s possible to leave totalitarian oppression behind. And Iraqis are listening.
Prime Minister Allawi recently visited the United States and gave us a window into the new Iraq. Let me read you his dramatic summary of how far Iraq has come in less than 18 months despite the predictions of the skeptics.
“At every step of the political process to date,” Allawi told a joint session of the U.S. Congress, “the courage and the resilience of the Iraqi people have proved the doubters wrong. They said we would miss the January deadline to pass the Interim Constitution. We proved them wrong. They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. They doubted whether a national conference could be started this August. We proved them wrong. Despite intimidation and violence, over 1,400 citizens, a quarter of them women, from every religious, ethnic and political grouping in Iraq, elected a national council. And I pledge to you today,” the prime minister said, “we’ll prove them wrong again over the elections.”
I recently met an American who had helped to organize that Iraqi National Conference. She told us about the very open and vigorous debates that were held there. But the most remarkable thing she told us was that virtually every day the conference came under mortar attack. When one particular mortar attack came especially close, the Iraqis paused for a few minutes to be sure that everyone was safe, and then went back to debating and sipping tea. It’s hard for me to imagine a parliament anywhere else in the world that would continue meeting under that kind of pressure—but they did.
Afghans are also determined. As I mentioned earlier, there will be a national election in Afghanistan this Saturday—the first in its history.
I think this demonstrates vividly that, like Nazism and Communism, the terrorist brand of totalitarianism runs fundamentally counter to the love of life and the love of freedom that represent the deepest longings of most human beings. The terrorists’ doctrine contains within it the seeds of its own defeat, but it will not collapse simply of its own weight. We must remain on offense.
There are some people who wonder whether this possibility of democracy in countries that have never experienced it isn’t too great a challenge. I have been heavily influenced by my own experience over 20 years dealing primarily with East Asia. I was the assistant secretary of state in the first half of the 1980’s, and then the American ambassador to Indonesia, which some of you may know has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. Back then, there was one democracy in the whole vast area of East Asia. It was Japan.
Back then, people said the Philippines couldn’t do any better than the dictator they had at the time, Ferdinand Marcos. They said the Koreans and Chinese didn’t care about freedom, or their Confucian heritage predisposed them to tyranny, or they were incapable of democracy because they had no historical experience with it. Those assertions ran counter to what President Reagan believed. As he put it in an historic address to the British Parliament in 1982, “It would be cultural condescension or even worse to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.”
In the Philippines, we initiated a persistent effort to prod Marcos to embrace democratic change. And I think in part, as a result, the Philippine people finally forced Marcos to accept defeat in the elections of 1986—turning that country from dictatorship to democracy. The following year, we saw a similar development in South Korea. Not long after that, Taiwan began to demonstrate that Chinese people, too, crave freedom and democratic self-government. And you no longer hear people say that Asians are incapable of democratic self-rule. I believe the same is true of Arabs.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the British Parliament about the hope of democracy. It wasn’t democracies, he noted, who invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish Solidarity. Today it is democracies who are actively helping in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Reagan told his British audience, “How we conduct ourselves here in the Western democracies will determine whether this trend continues. Democracy is not a fragile flower,” he said, “but still, it needs cultivating.”
It has been my experience that the majority of Iraqis are eager to be partners in this campaign for democracy. Despite all they have endured, all they must overcome, like their Polish allies, their own dream of freedom will not be vanquished.
Earlier this year, I met a young American soldier who had lost an arm and the sight in one eye fighting in Iraq last May. It’s an enormous sacrifice, but he put it in perspective this way. He said, “We’re fighting for everything we believe in. Saddam affected everything in that country and something had to be done.”
Something, indeed, had to be done. And that young soldier’s commitment has been mirrored in the brave Polish soldiers who have stood with us from the beginning.
There’s a passage in Winston Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War that describes the soul of Poland during one of its darkest hours. He quotes from the last broadcast from beleaguered Warsaw in 1944, the last broadcast of the uprising. “Your heroes,” the broadcast said, “are the soldiers whose only weapons against tanks were bottles filled with petrol, the women who tended the wounded and carried messages under fire, the children who went on quietly playing among the smoldering ruins. These are the people of Warsaw. Immortal is the nation that can muster such universal heroism. Poland lives when the Poles live.”
And Churchill added this in his own words: “When the Russians entered the city three months later they found little but shattered streets and the unburied dead. Such was their liberation of Poland, where they now rule. But this,” Churchill said, “cannot be the end of the story.”
And Churchill was right. There was more to the story. Poles waged more than just a physical struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. It was a test of faith and spirit.
Poland, free at last, continues to lead with courage, with determination and faith. And Poland is a powerful example to the rest of the world.
We will not forget Poland’s commitment. Just as you have stood with us, we will stand with you. Even as you offer encouragement to the Afghans and the Iraqis on their difficult road, we will help you, as our valued allies and partners.
As I mentioned, my late father was born in Warsaw 94 years ago. If he were alive today, I think he would be enormously pleased by the fact that, once again, Poles and Americans are united in fighting for freedom. He was a mathematician. And I think he’d be pleased that I am speaking here at Warsaw University, which has produced so many “real” scientists.
But speaking for myself—as an American—I am grateful that Poland is demonstrating to the American people that the sacrifices we have made to liberate others have come back to benefit us.
And so, in closing, I’d like to thank you for your kind reception and wish that our two nations may always be guided by words that have inspired Poles for generations: Za wolnosc wasza i nasza. [For your freedom and ours.] Thank you. [Applause.]
Remarks as Delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Warsaw, Poland, Tuesday, October 5, 2004.
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Thank you, Mr. Rector. Actually, on a personal note, my father was born in Warsaw and he was a mathematician. He would say that the saddest part of that introduction is that I went from mathematics—which is a real science—to political science.
I’m going to—if you indulge me—make one try at a little bit of Polish, but I promise you I won’t extend it: Polska – to kraj, dla ktorego mam duzy szacunek i wielka sympatie. [Poland is a country for which I have high respect and much affinity.] [Applause]
And indeed as I was thinking, if I had to give a title to these remarks, I think there is a theme and it just kind of emerges from the subject matter. The theme is: courage and freedom. And for me, most recently, it starts up at West Point, where the U.S. Military Academy is located.
I think for many of you, you know that one Polish hero has really become a legend in America, that’s Tadeusz Kosciuszko. You may or may not know that he organized the defense of West Point, which George Washington said was “the key to the revolution.” He wasn’t the only Pole who was there in our revolution. Americans also remember General Casimir Pulaski who died from wounds he suffered in the Battle of Savannah in 1779. Two years before his death, Pulaski told Benjamin Franklin: “We Poles have a hatred for all forms of tyranny, especially foreign tyranny. So no matter where in this world someone is fighting for freedom, we feel it is a personal matter to us as well.” That was a Polish general more than two hundred years ago.
But that tradition of courage in defense of freedom distinguished Poland in the 20th century as well. We remember the important role that Polish pilots played in the Battle of Britain and the daring of Polish soldiers who captured the seemingly impregnable fortress of Monte Cassino in Italy.
We remember the heroes of the Polish resistance, people like Jan Nowak, who risked his life to travel from Warsaw to Stockholm and London to try to enlist support to save Poland from Stalin’s postwar designs. His 1982 memoir entitled “Courier from Warsaw” closes by recalling his friends who gave their lives in the Second World War. He concludes with a fervent expression of hope for the future of Poland; he writes: “One day the sun will shine on crowds of singing and dancing people drunk with joy in the streets of Warsaw. The free soul of Poland will survive until that day.” And I might add, on a personal note, we had a chance to see the heart of Warsaw on a beautiful, sunny day. And, indeed, his prediction has come true.
We Americans fondly remember Lech Walesa and Solidarity, who proved to the world 20 years ago that the free soul of Poland still survived. Their courage helped to bring about the extraordinarily peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.
And even non-Catholics in my country have the deepest respect for the Polish spiritual leader and peacemaker, Pope John Paul II. “Freedom is given to man by God,” the Pope has said, “as a measure of his dignity.” And, “as children of God we cannot be slaves.”
This year, as you all know, marks the 60th anniversary of one of the 20th century’s most courageous stands against the slavery of Nazi occupation. And today, we had a chance to lay a wreath at the monument to the Warsaw Uprising. We remember how Warsaw was burned and torn apart once again, brick by brick, because her people wanted to be free.
And even when Poland was overcome by the evil of Soviet totalitarianism, the cherished dream of freedom still burned in the hearts of the Polish people. Winston Churchill once said of Poland that, despite its long bondage over more than a century, occupying powers had been “unable,” as he said, “to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible and that she will rise again like a rock which may, for a time, be submerged by a tidal wave but which remains a rock.”
Poles were rock-like in their conviction that freedom and justice would be theirs again one day. Today, Poles are free. And now, just as in the early days of my country, brave Americans and Poles are once again working and fighting side by side to bring freedom to nations where liberty has long been held captive.
Three years ago, President Bush came to this university and he spoke of the iron will of the Polish people. “Here you have proven,” he said, “that communism need not be followed by chaos, that great oppression can end in true reconciliation, and that the promise of freedom is stronger than the habit of fear.”
Indeed, Poland stands as a new leader of Europe. Poland’s leadership is marked by courage and belief in freedom, and strengthened by painful lessons of history.
Poles understand, perhaps better than anyone, the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes. And yes, I do include Saddam Hussein.
For Poland, September 1, 1939 is a date that lives in infamy. But, as you know, there was much that preceded Hitler’s tanks into Poland’s frontier.
In 1935, Britain and France acquiesced to Germany’s abrogation of its disarmament obligations. In 1936, Hitler ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland, betting correctly that the world’s hollow warnings formed weak defenses. When he annexed Austria in 1938, the world again sat by. When he marched into Prague later that same year, the world sat still once again. And finally when the world warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, he assumed that this warning was just as empty as all the ones that had come before. Poland and the world paid for it with the worst war in history.
But, Poland’s ordeal did not end with the end of that war. For Poland, it began four decades of Soviet occupation. And yet despite all of that tragedy, democracy flourishes in Poland—after a journey of courage and determination whose difficulties only Poles can truly comprehend, but which Americans deeply admire.
Many people hoped that the Cold War’s end would bring a long period of unbroken peace. But September 11, 2001 gave us another rude awakening. We were face to face once again with the ugly reality that evil didn’t simply disappear with the demise of Hitler and Stalin. The cold-blooded murder of 3,000 innocent souls—from America and Poland and many other countries—on that September day once again put us in the middle of a war that we didn’t look for. And once again, the target is freedom itself.
Fortunately, we confront these dangers with a new set of allies. And in response to the extraordinary threat posed by international terrorism, NATO has a new sense of purpose. In this global fight, NATO can rightly claim its own historic contributions. For the first time in NATO’s history, Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty was invoked, of all things, to defend the United States. NATO AWACS airplanes patrolled American skies. NATO support for the International Security Force in Afghanistan helped ensure the stability and neutrality of that country’s capital. And the NATO contribution to Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan is enabling the Afghan government to expand its authority, making the country more peaceful, stable and secure.
And this Saturday, Afghans, for what I believe is the first time in their history, will hold a national election for their president—an election for which 10.6 million people have registered to vote, forty percent of them women, despite intimidation and threats from the Taliban. It is quite an achievement.
The NATO alliance remains as vital to our national security today as it was in the Cold War. It’s true of Europe as well. The menace of terrorism, I believe, threatens all of us. No one can fight it alone. Only together can we defeat the challenge—the particularly dangerous challenge—posed by the intersection of weapons of mass terror, terrorist organizations, and state support for terrorism.
I remember I was working in the U.S. Defense Department for a Secretary of Defense named Richard Cheney when the Berlin Wall came down. Many questioned whether NATO was necessary anymore. I still remember the first press conference that President George H.W. Bush—we call him “41”; he was the forty-first president of the United States. In his first press conference after the Wall came down, he was asked why we need NATO, now that the threat had gone away. President Bush answered, the threat is “uncertainty,” the threat is “instability.” And some people laughed at that answer, but it was a wise answer.
The intervening years have demonstrated its wisdom. Indeed, new threats did emerge in Europe, particularly in the Balkans—indeed, the worst crimes against humanity since the demise of Hitler. And ultimately NATO proved to be the only really effective instrument for dealing with this new threat to European stability and for opposing genocide and tyranny.
When Poland and other new democracies of Central Europe gained their freedom after more than four decades of Soviet tyranny, there were some who said it would be dangerous and destabilizing to welcome these newly-free countries into NATO.
I am personally proud of having worked for Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense—he was probably the first senior American to recognize that bringing Poland and other Central European countries into NATO was in both the strategic and moral interests of the United States and Europe.
And indeed, Polish membership in NATO has provided your country with the assurances it deserves that Poland’s hard-won freedom will be protected. But also, despite those predictions that it would cause instability or create a new dividing line down the center of Europe—remember those phrases—Polish membership in NATO instead has seen Poland take the lead in promoting stability and progress in Europe and helped lead the way for nine other new members in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
By remaining true to its founding vision of a Europe whole, free, and undivided, NATO has shown that an alliance based on a belief in freedom has more staying power than any alliance in history. And for this reason, the United States and Poland have worked hard together to modernize and strengthen NATO.
Some people are concerned that our attention might be totally absorbed by Afghanistan and Iraq. But that is not the case.
To the contrary, we have streamlined and modernized the Alliance’s command structure to make it better prepared for the 21st century. We have established Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk to lead U.S. and European militaries into this new world. We have established the NATO Response Force, elements of which are already serving together in Afghanistan. And the recently established NATO Chemical Biological Nuclear and Radiological Battalion, CBNR, as we like to call it. The NATO CBNR Battalion led by the Czech Republic has contributed to real world operations assisting with security during the Athens Olympics.
It’s particularly important to extend the values that NATO stands for to the whole of Europe. Our objective of a Europe whole and free will not be complete until Ukraine is a full-fledged member of Europe. As President Bush said here in Warsaw, ”We must extend our hand to Ukraine, as Poland has done with such determination.” And few countries have more to offer to assist reform in Ukraine than Poland. In the same way, we must continue trying to build a bridge to Belarus, whose people are denied freedom by an authoritarian dictator.
President Bush came to Warsaw in 2001, and it was here that he launched his campaign for helping ensure the Alliance’s continuing vitality and relevancy—through further NATO enlargement.
With the addition of Hungary and the Czech Republic and Poland, NATO is enriched. And it’s been strengthened further by the addition of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. These newly free countries understand the difficult journey to democracy. With Poland, they can stand as powerful beacons for emerging democracies—in Europe and now, hopefully, in the Middle East, and Central and South Asia.
Poland has quickly moved from being a new member of NATO to being an important NATO leader—a tribute to the courage and commitment that we Americans have long admired about our Polish friends.
And as President Bush has highlighted again and again, Poland is important in keeping a strong transatlantic link, as a member of the EU as well.
Freedom has been the glue of the world’s strongest alliances and freedom has been the solvent that has dissolved tyrannical rule. It has held NATO allies together over the course of four decades of often-contentious debates. And it brought some 40 countries into the coalition effort in Afghanistan, some 30 countries into Iraq and 80 or 90 countries into the larger coalition against global terror.
After the tragedy of September 11th, President Bush recognized that the world could no longer live with ambiguity. Every country, he said, has to make a choice. We could no longer continue living with states that sponsor terrorism, states that have the potential to put the world’s worst weapons in the hands of terrorists.
The Taliban, operating under the guise of religion, chose the terrorists. As a result, they have joined the Soviets and the Nazis on the ash heap of history.
Qaddafi was given a choice. He saw the success of the Coalition’s military in the region and he chose to stop violating his international obligations and to peacefully dismantle his weapons programs.
Saddam Hussein also had a choice. As a matter of fact, it was a choice he had been confronted with in 17 successive U.N. resolutions over the course of 12 years: not to threaten his neighbors, not to support terrorism, not to commit genocide against his own people. He had been warned not to interfere with the flights that were monitoring his compliance. He had finally been warned to declare fully and completely all of his programs for weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems and to stop interfering with U.N. inspections.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was his 17th—and supposed to be his final—chance. Saddam Hussein chose defiance. He chose to continue to hide his activities from inspectors. He chose to continue to support terrorism. And he continued to torture his country and his people in a way that puts him among the most brutal tyrants of the last hundred years.
Perhaps Saddam Hussein hoped that we would turn a blind eye to his choices, just as other nations had done at other times in history, and most dramatically and tragically in the 1930’s.
Maybe he wagered that what one writer has called “the density of evil” that permeated Iraq would go unnoticed. Or maybe he thought other nations just didn’t care, or cared more about their commercial interests. In any case, he chose wrong. And free nations said: the evil had to stop.
The depth of that evil is so alien to the experience of most people, it’s necessary to talk about it—not simply to talk about the past or to explain why this war was necessary, but to talk about the present and the future and to understand what it is that Iraqis have to overcome.
They are now trying to cast off a smothering blanket of fear, a blanket of fear woven by 35 years of the most brutal kind of repression, where even the smallest mistake could mean torture or death, or punishments worse than death. Yes, there are punishments worse than death—like fathers or mothers being forced to watch their children tortured or killed.
Poles have an ability to appreciate far better than Americans how that kind of blanket of fear can distort the behavior of even perfectly decent human beings. Perhaps you also understand that that sort of fear is not something that can be cast off immediately and simply forgotten—particularly not when the people who inflicted that fear are still at large and killing people.
Saddam began weaving that terrible blanket from the very beginning. In 1979, one of his first acts as President of Iraq was to conduct a sweeping purge of top Baathist Party leaders. He held a meeting of the Iraqi National Assembly, and with pretend tears in his eyes, Saddam talked about how a senior party member had confessed his disloyalty. As he named other guilty colleagues, guards dragged them, one by one, out of the meeting. Saddam then asked his ministers and top party leaders for their first test of loyalty. He made them participate in the firing squads that executed their former colleagues.
But, that wasn’t enough for Saddam—no. He had videotapes made of that event and sent to leaders throughout the Middle East, so that his neighbors would know just what kind of leader they were dealing with. Saddam was the head of an internationally recognized government, but he acted more like a vicious gangland boss.
Videotaped torture was, in fact, common. One American writer who recently viewed some of these tapes described Saddam’s thugs chopping off hands, fingers and tongues, so-called Fedayeen Saddam ruthlessly breaking the arms of a comrade who failed to carry out orders. Of these images this American writer wrote: “They are the sort that no civilized person wants another to see.”
On one of my trips to Iraq, I saw the forked trunk of a dead tree behind the police Academy in Baghdad. On each branch of the tree, the bark is permanently marked by what had been two sets of ropes: one set, high enough to tie up a man; the shorter set, to tie up a woman. Our guide told us about horrific things that happened to the men and women who were tied to that tree.
Just beyond the torture tree was a gate to the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee which, as some of you may know, was headed by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s most evil son. Sometimes at night, Uday would come to personally torture and abuse prisoners. And while we were on a trip through Northern Iraq last year, one commander told us that workers had temporarily stopped the excavation of a newly discovered mass grave, after unearthing the remains of 80 women and children—some still with little dresses and toys.
Permit me one more: In the south, we visited a small village of the Marsh Arabs. We had to travel over a man-made desert the size of the state of New Jersey—a desert created by Saddam in order to exterminate these people. The Marsh Arabs are one of the oldest civilizations in the world going back several thousand years. But the marshes around which their whole livelihood and civilization have been based, had been destroyed. After 35 years of this kind of genocidal repression, a population of half a million has been reduced to somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000.
When we got to the small village, children came and greeted us with cheers of “Salaam Bush,” and in Arabic—which I don’t know, but was translated—“Down with Saddam.” And they reached out their hands, and they weren’t asking for candy, they weren’t asking for toys, just a single word: “Water?”
During the Cold War, some people argued about this part of the world that at least the Soviet Union provided stability. I think you and Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as “the stability of the graveyard.”
Well, the so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was something even worse. Beyond the genocidal murders, he systematically destroyed Iraq—building palaces, while the infrastructure decayed beyond repair, starving his people while stealing money from the UN’s Oil for Food program, and exporting terrorism, inciting terrorism and funding terrorism.
From the very first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Poland has fought side by side with America to halt these evil and horrific crimes against humanity.
The tragedy of World War II came about, in part, because people in my country believed that the Atlantic Ocean provided a wall behind which the United States could hide from the tragedy that was about to engulf Europe. Today I think there are some people who believe that they might escape the scourge of terrorism by building a high enough wall around their country—but that’s an illusion.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Poland’s Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski put it correctly. He said: “By taking part in this operation in Iraq we are proving that we properly understand the nature of modern threats and the philosophy of counteracting them. Now, thanks in part to us, the world is safer, we are safer. Today,” he said, “the war is never far away, and no one’s home is safe. We will not close ourselves off and we will not hide from danger behind any wall.”
Minister Szmajdzinski is right. We cannot hide behind walls. And no one is truly safe from the threat we face.
Our enemies know us by our love of life and democracy. We know them by their worship of death and their philosophy of despair. Earlier this year, we were given a window into that dark and hopeless world when we intercepted a letter from an al Qaeda associate in Iraq to his colleagues in Afghanistan. That letter from a man who’s, unfortunately, become very well-known to the world, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggests how terrorists view the benefits of a free and open society in the Middle East. “Democracy” in Iraq “is coming,” Zarqawi wrote. That, he said, will mean “suffocation” for the terrorists.
He talks with contempt about Iraqis who, in his words, “look ahead to a sunny tomorrow, a prosperous future, a carefree life, comfort and favor.” His letter is available on the Internet. Read it. I think you will see that the contempt Zarqawi displays for whole groups of human beings—including Christians and Jews, but also Muslim Shia and Muslim Kurds—calls to mind the racism of the Nazis.
When Zarqawi claims credit for bombs that kill innocent civilians and innocent children, he doesn’t care what religion they happen to be. You will see that his glorification of death and violence calls to mind the tyrannical movements of the last century. Zarqawi and bin Laden and others like them may claim the mantle of religion, but their rhetoric is more reminiscent of the death’s head of Hitler’s SS.
They may profess to be religious, but they teach that destruction is good, murder is noble, that killing innocents, even children, will earn the murderer paradise—despite the fact that Islam condemns murder and suicide. They use mosques as part of their terror campaign, and desecrate Muslim holy places. And they say that their ultimate goal is God’s greater glory, but what they truly glorify is murder. Their ultimate goal is raw power. That is not religion. That is totalitarian ideology.
And that is the point where terrorists and Saddamists converge. Their long-term goals may differ, but their immediate goal is the same—to use fear and terror to prevent the emergence of a free Iraq. They have nothing positive to offer, only death and destruction. They play on fears of a population that has been terrorized for 35 years—and, in some cases, by the same people who are killing today.
That is the heart of the reason why this fight continues to be difficult. But it is also the great weakness of the enemies we are fighting. Because they offer nothing positive, most Iraqis would like to see them defeated. And more and more Iraqis are stepping up to fight them.
The majority of the Iraqis know that whether terrorists and Saddamists actively work together or not, the efforts of one support the other. With each life claimed by an indiscriminate attack, with each act of sabotage of Iraq’s infrastructure, with each barbaric beheading, our enemies define themselves in vivid contrast to the goal of a free Iraq.
Our objective is to build up Iraq. Our enemies want to finish Saddam’s work and tear Iraq down. Iraqis want to live in safety and freedom to pursue their own happiness. Terrorists target Iraqis who simply go about their daily lives. Iraqis want free and fair elections. Terrorists desperately target each step of that process. We build schools. They kill children.
But despite their savagery, Iraqis are moving forward with great courage. Even though they know they’re risking their lives in doing so, thousands of Iraqis continue to join the army, the national guard and the police force. A fact that is not sufficiently known or appreciated is that more than 700 Iraqis in the police, in the army and national guard, have already given their lives in this fight for a free Iraq. And they are led by courageous leaders, who are no strangers to being targets of terror.
Prime Minister Allawi, who is known to all the world, knows what it’s like to have a price on his head. Even in exile, he wasn’t safe. In 1979, he was sleeping in his apartment in London when he woke just in time to move his head out of the way of an ax wielded by one of Saddam’s assassins. The ax nearly took his leg off. He spent a year in the hospital. He was the target of two or three more assassination attempts. He knows what it is to put your life on the line. His deputy prime minister has been the target of assassination attempts. Indeed, every senior official in the Iraqi government, every governor in Iraq, every police chief, and many, many others know they are risking their lives every day. But they continue to do so. And it’s not just the leaders; it’s ordinary citizens as well.
When we visited Fallujah this past June, I met a U.S. Marine whose life had been saved by five brave members of the Iraqi National Guard. Two of them had risked their own lives to pull him off the battlefield under enemy fire. They received the Navy commendation medal with valor for their actions.
And one that has really stuck with me was a young woman we met in Northern Iraq, who was working as an interpreter. Her sister had been murdered a few weeks before. A member of my party asked her, “Why do you continue to work with us?” And she said very simply, “My father said, ‘You must never back down in the face of evil.’”
Iraqis are not backing down. And they have the support of extraordinarily brave coalition partners.
Indeed, Polish soldiers in Iraq have shown the same courage and commitment to freedom that Casimir Pulaski spoke about to Ben Franklin 200 years ago. We mourn with Poland the sacrifice of 17 soldiers and civilians in this noble fight for freedom. Every life lost in this cause is precious, and we can honor their memory by ensuring that their sacrifice is not in vain.
When the time came to take action in Iraq, 34 countries contributed troops, including nine of NATO’s new members. But Poland stood out as one of the four countries that sent troops into combat on the very first day. Polish Special Forces helped to capture oil platforms in the Shatt al-Arab that had explosives onboard, but that had not been rigged to cause destruction.
And, as I think you are familiar with, Poland has taken command of one of the most diverse military units ever assembled: a 10,000-man division of soldiers from 21 countries who speak 17 different languages. On my visits to Iraq, I have been privileged to meet the first Polish commander of that multinational division, Maj. Gen. Tyszkiewicz, as well as his successor Maj. Gen. Bienek. They are both impressive officers, and I hear that the current commander, Maj. Gen Ekiert, is so as well.
Last October, when I met Maj. Gen. Tyszkiewicz in Hilla, where he was responsible for an area called the Shia heartland, which is about one-quarter the size of your country—a huge area of responsibility, and a huge mission—he told me that when Iraqis come to him to complain about electricity shortages and unemployment, he tells them about the challenges that Poland faced after throwing off the Soviet yoke. I think what may be one of the reasons that Poles are doing so well in this delicate mission is that they understand better than most what Iraqis are facing. What they can also tell them, as Gen. Tyszkiewicz did, is that Poles did not lose heart, that you have made continuous progress, and that you are incomparably better off than you were under a tyrannical rule.
Poles have credibility when you say that it’s possible to leave totalitarian oppression behind. And Iraqis are listening.
Prime Minister Allawi recently visited the United States and gave us a window into the new Iraq. Let me read you his dramatic summary of how far Iraq has come in less than 18 months despite the predictions of the skeptics.
“At every step of the political process to date,” Allawi told a joint session of the U.S. Congress, “the courage and the resilience of the Iraqi people have proved the doubters wrong. They said we would miss the January deadline to pass the Interim Constitution. We proved them wrong. They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. They doubted whether a national conference could be started this August. We proved them wrong. Despite intimidation and violence, over 1,400 citizens, a quarter of them women, from every religious, ethnic and political grouping in Iraq, elected a national council. And I pledge to you today,” the prime minister said, “we’ll prove them wrong again over the elections.”
I recently met an American who had helped to organize that Iraqi National Conference. She told us about the very open and vigorous debates that were held there. But the most remarkable thing she told us was that virtually every day the conference came under mortar attack. When one particular mortar attack came especially close, the Iraqis paused for a few minutes to be sure that everyone was safe, and then went back to debating and sipping tea. It’s hard for me to imagine a parliament anywhere else in the world that would continue meeting under that kind of pressure—but they did.
Afghans are also determined. As I mentioned earlier, there will be a national election in Afghanistan this Saturday—the first in its history.
I think this demonstrates vividly that, like Nazism and Communism, the terrorist brand of totalitarianism runs fundamentally counter to the love of life and the love of freedom that represent the deepest longings of most human beings. The terrorists’ doctrine contains within it the seeds of its own defeat, but it will not collapse simply of its own weight. We must remain on offense.
There are some people who wonder whether this possibility of democracy in countries that have never experienced it isn’t too great a challenge. I have been heavily influenced by my own experience over 20 years dealing primarily with East Asia. I was the assistant secretary of state in the first half of the 1980’s, and then the American ambassador to Indonesia, which some of you may know has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. Back then, there was one democracy in the whole vast area of East Asia. It was Japan.
Back then, people said the Philippines couldn’t do any better than the dictator they had at the time, Ferdinand Marcos. They said the Koreans and Chinese didn’t care about freedom, or their Confucian heritage predisposed them to tyranny, or they were incapable of democracy because they had no historical experience with it. Those assertions ran counter to what President Reagan believed. As he put it in an historic address to the British Parliament in 1982, “It would be cultural condescension or even worse to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.”
In the Philippines, we initiated a persistent effort to prod Marcos to embrace democratic change. And I think in part, as a result, the Philippine people finally forced Marcos to accept defeat in the elections of 1986—turning that country from dictatorship to democracy. The following year, we saw a similar development in South Korea. Not long after that, Taiwan began to demonstrate that Chinese people, too, crave freedom and democratic self-government. And you no longer hear people say that Asians are incapable of democratic self-rule. I believe the same is true of Arabs.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the British Parliament about the hope of democracy. It wasn’t democracies, he noted, who invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish Solidarity. Today it is democracies who are actively helping in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Reagan told his British audience, “How we conduct ourselves here in the Western democracies will determine whether this trend continues. Democracy is not a fragile flower,” he said, “but still, it needs cultivating.”
It has been my experience that the majority of Iraqis are eager to be partners in this campaign for democracy. Despite all they have endured, all they must overcome, like their Polish allies, their own dream of freedom will not be vanquished.
Earlier this year, I met a young American soldier who had lost an arm and the sight in one eye fighting in Iraq last May. It’s an enormous sacrifice, but he put it in perspective this way. He said, “We’re fighting for everything we believe in. Saddam affected everything in that country and something had to be done.”
Something, indeed, had to be done. And that young soldier’s commitment has been mirrored in the brave Polish soldiers who have stood with us from the beginning.
There’s a passage in Winston Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War that describes the soul of Poland during one of its darkest hours. He quotes from the last broadcast from beleaguered Warsaw in 1944, the last broadcast of the uprising. “Your heroes,” the broadcast said, “are the soldiers whose only weapons against tanks were bottles filled with petrol, the women who tended the wounded and carried messages under fire, the children who went on quietly playing among the smoldering ruins. These are the people of Warsaw. Immortal is the nation that can muster such universal heroism. Poland lives when the Poles live.”
And Churchill added this in his own words: “When the Russians entered the city three months later they found little but shattered streets and the unburied dead. Such was their liberation of Poland, where they now rule. But this,” Churchill said, “cannot be the end of the story.”
And Churchill was right. There was more to the story. Poles waged more than just a physical struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. It was a test of faith and spirit.
Poland, free at last, continues to lead with courage, with determination and faith. And Poland is a powerful example to the rest of the world.
We will not forget Poland’s commitment. Just as you have stood with us, we will stand with you. Even as you offer encouragement to the Afghans and the Iraqis on their difficult road, we will help you, as our valued allies and partners.
As I mentioned, my late father was born in Warsaw 94 years ago. If he were alive today, I think he would be enormously pleased by the fact that, once again, Poles and Americans are united in fighting for freedom. He was a mathematician. And I think he’d be pleased that I am speaking here at Warsaw University, which has produced so many “real” scientists.
But speaking for myself—as an American—I am grateful that Poland is demonstrating to the American people that the sacrifices we have made to liberate others have come back to benefit us.
And so, in closing, I’d like to thank you for your kind reception and wish that our two nations may always be guided by words that have inspired Poles for generations: Za wolnosc wasza i nasza. [For your freedom and ours.] Thank you. [Applause.]
Decision Iraq Would Kerry Have Done Things Differently?
By Bob Woodward
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page B04
The role of commander in chief is clearly one of the president's most important jobs. But a presidential campaign provides voters little opportunity to evaluate how a candidate would handle that role, particularly if the candidate isn't an incumbent.
At the end of last year, during 3 1/2 hours of interviews over two days, I asked President Bush hundreds of detailed questions about his actions and decisions during the 16-month run-up to the war in Iraq. His answers were published in my book "Plan of Attack." Beginning on June 16, I had discussions and meetings with Sen. John Kerry's senior foreign policy, communications and political advisers about interviewing the senator to find out how he might have acted on Iraq -- to ask him what he would have done at certain key points. Senior Kerry advisers initially seemed positive about such an interview. One aide told me, "The short answer is yes, it's going to happen."
In August, I was talking with Kerry's scheduler about possible dates. On Sept. 1, Kerry began his intense criticism of Bush's decisions in the Iraq war, saying "I would've done almost everything differently." A few days later, I provided the Kerry campaign with a list of 22 possible questions based entirely on Bush's actions leading up to the war and how Kerry might have responded in the same situations. The senator and his campaign have since decided not to do the interview, though his advisers say Kerry would have strong and compelling answers.
Because the interview did not occur, it is not possible to do the side-by-side comparison of Bush's record and Kerry's answers that I had envisioned. But it seems to me that the questions themselves offer a useful framework for thinking about the role of a president who must decide whether to go to war.
Here are the 22 questions, edited only for clarity:
1. On Nov. 21, 2001, just 72 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush took Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld aside and said he wanted to look at the Iraq war plans. Bush directed Rumsfeld not to talk to anyone else, including the National Security Council members and the CIA director.
Questions: If a President Kerry wanted to look at war plans pertaining to a particular country or threat, how would he go about it? Who would be included? What would the general war-planning process be in a Kerry administration? Was it reasonable to look at Iraq at that time?
2. The CIA was asked in late 2001 to do a "lessons learned" study of past covert operations in Iraq and concluded that the CIA alone could not overthrow Saddam Hussein and that a military operation would be required. The CIA soon became an advocate for military action.
Questions: How can such advocacy be avoided? The CIA argued that a two-track policy -- negotiations at the U.N. and covert action -- made their sources inside Iraq believe the United States was not serious about overthrowing Saddam. Can that be avoided? How can diplomacy and covert action be balanced?
3. In January 2002 President Bush gave his famous "axis of evil" speech singling out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as threats.
Questions: Was this speech too undiplomatic? How would a President Kerry frame the issues and relations with Iran and North Korea? Do you consider these two countries part of an axis of evil now?
4. On Feb. 16, 2002, the president signed a secret intelligence order directing the CIA to begin covert action to support a military operation to overthrow Saddam, ultimately allocating some $200 million a year. Bush later acknowledged to me that even six months later, in August, the administration had not developed a diplomatic strategy to deal with Iraq.
Questions: How should military planning, CIA activities and diplomacy (and economic sanctions and the bully pulpit) fit together to form a policy?
5. On May 24, 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks and the Pentagon's Joint Staff began work on stability operations to follow combat in Iraq. This was about 10 months before the Iraq war started. But it was not until seven months later, in January 2003, that President Bush became involved in the aftermath planning.
Questions: How would you make sure that there was sufficient planning for both the war and the peace? What aspects would you want to be personally involved in or aware of as president?
6. On June 1, 2002, President Bush announced his preemption doctrine.
Questions: Do you agree with it? What are the acceptable conditions for preemptive war? Bush has said that he believes the United States has a "duty to free people," to liberate them. Do you agree? Under what circumstances?
7. In July 2002, President Bush secretly ordered that some $700 million be spent on 30 major construction and other projects to prepare for war. Congress was not involved or informed.
Questions: How would you seek a relationship with the leaders of Congress so that they would be informed of such secret work? Should congressional leaders have an idea where you are heading? What should be the overall role of Congress in preparing for war?
8. In August 2002 (about seven months before the start of war in March 2003), Secretary of State Colin Powell told the president over a two-hour dinner that an Iraq war would have consequences that had not been considered or imagined. He said that an invasion would lead to the collapse of Iraq -- "You break it, you own it."
Questions: What would you do after receiving such a clear warning from a senior cabinet officer or other person with comparable experience?
9. On Nov. 8, 2002, the U.N. Security Council unanimously (15 to 0) passed Resolution 1441 on new weapons inspections in Iraq. Powell thought it was a critical victory, putting the United States on the road to diplomatic success.
Questions: What did this mean, now that Saddam seemed isolated and friendless in the world? Was strategic victory -- getting Saddam out of power -- possible through diplomacy or by continuing diplomacy and weapons inspections?
10. In November-December 2002, major U.S. force deployments began but were strung out to avoid telling the world that war was all but inevitable and that diplomacy was over. Rumsfeld told the president that the large U.S. divisions could be kept in top fighting shape for only two to three months without degrading the force.
Questions: How might a President Kerry have handled this? What is the role of momentum in such a decision-making process?
11. On Dec. 21, 2002, CIA deputy John McLaughlin gave a major presentation to the president on the intelligence evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The president was not impressed and asked where the good, strong intelligence was. CIA Director George Tenet twice assured the president that the WMD case was a "slam dunk."
Questions: What might a President Kerry have done when he smelled weakness in an intelligence case?
12. On Jan. 9, 2003, the president asked Gen. Franks: What is my last decision point? Franks said it would be when Special Forces were put on the ground inside Iraq.
Question: Had the president already passed his last decision point when he ordered such a large military deployment and such extensive CIA covert action to support the military?
13. Around this time, in January 2003, Rumsfeld told the president that he was losing his options, and that after he asked U.S. allies to commit forces, it would not be feasible to back off. Rumsfeld asked to brief the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Vice President Cheney, Gen. Richard Myers and Rumsfeld briefed Bandar on Jan. 11, 2003, telling him "You can count on this" -- i.e., war.
Questions: Do you agree with Rumsfeld's assessment? Andy Card, the Bush White House chief of staff, thought the decision to go to war was not irrevocable, that Bush could pull back, though the consequences would be politically expensive. How does a president credibly threaten force without taking steps that make the use of force almost inevitable? Should foreign governments be briefed in this way?
14. On Jan. 13, 2003, the director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, issued a formal director's intent on how to support Gen. Franks in a war with Iraq. Previously, on his own, Hayden had reallocated some $300 million to $400 million of NSA funds to Iraq-specific signals intelligence programs to support a war without the specific knowledge or approval of either Rumsfeld, Tenet or Bush.
Questions: Was this good planning? What would be the procedures for such decisions in a Kerry administration?
15. On Jan. 20, 2003 (two months before the war), the president signed National Security Presidential Directive 24 to set up the office for reconstruction for Iraq.
Question: What do you think of the timing of this?
16. On Feb. 7, 2003 (six weeks before war started), French President Jacques Chirac called the president and was very conciliatory. He said, "If there is a war, we'll work together on reconstruction. We will all contribute. I fully understand your position is different. There are two different moral approaches to the world and I respect yours." Bush was optimistic but took no action.
Question: What would a President Kerry have done about this conciliatory statement?
17. On March 17, 2003, concluding that Saddam was stalling and lying, Bush ordered war while U.N. weapons inspectors were still in Iraq.
Questions: Was this decision right or premature? Was there any other action, short of war, that would have effectively increased pressure on Saddam?
18. On Sept. 30, 2003 (six months after the start of the war), British Prime Minister Tony Blair told his annual Labor Party conference that he had received letters from parents whose sons were killed in the Iraq war, saying that they hated him. "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that they don't suffer any doubt," Blair said. President Bush has said emphatically that he has no such doubts.
Questions: Can a president afford to have doubt in a time of war? What is the role of doubt in presidential decision-making?
19. Secretary of State Powell has said that he believed Cheney had a "fever," an unhealthy fixation on al Qaeda and Iraq that caused him to misread and exaggerate intelligence and the threat. In Powell's view, Cheney and others -- Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy -- were part of "a separate little government."
Questions: Your reaction? What should or could a president do about this discord among top officials of his administration?
20. Powell also had said he believed that the Bush administration had become "dangerously protective" of its decisions on Iraq and was unable to consider changing course.
Question: How does a president set up a system or process to enable his administration to alter course or get a clear-eyed evaluation of its actions and its consequences?
21. President Bush has said on the record that he did not directly ask Powell, Rumsfeld or his father, former President George H.W. Bush, whether he should go to war in Iraq. He did ask national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and his senior aide, Karen Hughes.
Questions: Your reaction? What sort of consultation process would you have on major national security decisions? Would you consult former presidents, even former President Bush?
22. Asked in December 2003 how history would judge his Iraq war, Bush suggested that history was far off. "We won't know. We'll all be dead," he said.
Questions: How do you judge his Iraq war? What do you think history's verdict is likely to be?
Bob Woodward is a Post reporter and assistant managing editor. He is the author of 12 books, including two on the current administration, "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack."
