of afghanistan in a matter of weeks. they had a civil war. here is a country that is landlocked, poor, large i will literacy, drought, ten or 12 years of soviet occupation, every conceivable problem you can imagine, a civil war going on for years with the northern alliance trying to fight against the taliban and in a matter of weeks handful of special forces people supplies, and massive air power from the united states were able to achieve the defeat of the taliban and chasing the al qaeda out of the country. it was a country that was run by the taliban which was i think recognized by only three nations in the world as a legitimate government. they were using their soccer fields to cut off people's heads instead of play soccer. the women weren't allowed out on the street without a male member

of their family. they weren't allowed to see doctors because they weren't allowed to go to school or become doctors. they couldn't go to a male doctor. it was a terrible situation in the country. i remember shortly after we went into afghanistan and i had to go around to the neighboring countries and try to find support for our basing and over flight rights and various types of assistance, and i went to oman, and there is a silton named caboose and he was at the time not in the capitol, out in a tent meeting with his constituents, and it must have been 140 degrees in the tent. he sat there just as cool as he could be, and we were per entiring through three layers of clothes, and he looked at me and he said something to the effect -- he was british trained, spoke english perfectly

and something to the next that 9/11 may very well be a blessing in disguise as terrible as it was, and i said in what sense? he said, well, it may just not wake-up call for your country and the world that we will take actions and work together in a way that will prevent not 3,000 but 300,000 or 3 million dead because of the use of more powerful and more lethal weapons. the concept of anticipate to her self-defense was mentioned or pre emgs. we always as we know respected other people's borders and have every thought every country had the right to do what it needed to do within its own country, but so did the other countries, the neighboring countries. with the advent of these lethal weapons, weapons of mass

destruction, the idea of waiting until you're attacked to defend yourself is one thing if someone is going to come across your border with conventional forces, quite another thing if you're going to be attacked with the weapons of that lethality, and you don't have the option to wait until you're attacked as previously the case when it was a ground force or bomb or conventional weapon of some i understand could. kind. that caused the president to fashion what became known as a bush doctrine in part of anticipate to her self-defense, the realization that in fact if you wait, it is too late. that is a hard thing, particularly given the unevenness of intelligence and the difficulty of the

intelligence gatherer's task. another problem that came up was the problem of language and words matter. if you think about it, the war on terror is a phrase. it is in my view and i told the president this, not perfect. first of all, if you say war, it sounds like you are, again, win this with bullets and that it is conventional and that it is the problem for the department of defense when in fact it is something quite different, and it is not going to be won with bullets. it is much more like the cold war. it is much more a battle of ideology and a competition of ideas and it is going to take all elements of national power and therefore i argued that war on terror might mislead people in a sense and might cause people to expect things that aren't realistic, and i struggle with trying to come up with a

better alternative, and i failed. i thought about a struggle against violent extremists and different ways of trying to do it and the president stuck with war on terror, and that's what it is still called largely today. the other problem is the unwillingness to identify the enemy. if you think about it, in the cold war, communism was identified. we pinned the tail on the donkey. we talked about it. we said what it did, how it didn't work, how command economies were inefficient, how unfree political systems were not the kind of system that is unleashed human energy and creativity and over time, communism, was largely left as i guess president reagan said in the ash bins of history, and a little bit left in cuba, a little bit left in north korea, but not much else. i worried that we weren't

pinning the tail on the donkey, we weren't calling it what it really is, and it is an element of the muslim faith of zealots and fanatics and extremists and islamists, and that is what it is, and we were scared to death in the administration. someone asked me what i understand could of grade do you give the bush administration on the use of words and language. i said, well, i am an easy grader. i give them a d. i said give us a d, i meant. why? everyone was very nervous about being seen as anti-religion, and that's understandable because nobody is anti-religion, and an enormous fraction of people on the face of the earth are muslims. if the fact is that it is a small strain of islamists and

solifists in that religion that are the extremists and causing the problem and training people to kill innocent men, women and children, then we make in my view a terrible mistake by not saying it, by not elevating it and calling it what it is, and once you do that, i think it gets clear that we're not going to win that battle of ideas. that battle of ideas ultimately is going to be won within that faith, and we have to figure out how all of the elements of ours and our allies and friends around the world with deal with this threat to nation states and that's what it is. it is a threat to nation states, imposing that narrow set of views and behavior pattern on the world is a something that has to be resisted and the use of force, the training of people to go out and kill innocent men, women and children to achieve that is something that has to be

resisted, and i don't believe you achieve that unless you say what it is, identify it, and find ways to help others in that faith who don't believe that. the overwhelming majority of people in that faith that don't believe it, find ways to help them battle it within their religion in my view is probably the only way it will change. i have mentioned anticipate to her self-defense. let me mention the freedom agen agenda. president bush in his second innag ral address said merge's vital interests are no won. from the day of our founding we proclaimed that every man, woman on either has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth, across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government because no one is fit to be a master and no one

deserves to be a slave. advancing these ideals is the many i guess that created our nation. it is the honorable achievement of our fathers. now, it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our tong, so it is the policy of the united states to seek and want is the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world, unquote. that's a big order. that is a very big order. some people thought that that -- frequently the word freedom was miss impressioned, interchanged with the word democracy, and in my view when the word democracy is used in the world outside of our country, the risk is that people think of the united states, and they think of this template and they think that we

think that our template of democracy is what we are trying to impose on the rest of the world. people don't like to have our template imposed on them. they know they have different cultures, they have different histories. they have different neighbors. they have different circumstances. the use of that word, i kept trying to get within the administration, the use of the word freer political systems and freer economic systems as a something that was moving in the direction that the president's quote properly says. i mean, we know that the world is a better place. if you look down from mars on earth, the countries that are doing the best to are their people are the countries that have the freer political systems and the freer economic systems, and there the countries that tend not to try to impose their will on their neighbors. let me give you a few examples of this. uzbekistan back in 2005.

there was a prison break. i had gone to uzbekistan, met can karemof, a member in the old soviet union and he was no democrat to be sure. he was an author tear an post soviet leader, and he had a terrorism problem in his country. there was an islamic movement that was anti the government and operated in that region, and there was a group that stormed a prison and released all the prisoners, and the government stepped in and put that down. when i met with president kareem off, he agreed to let us use his base, to put in our special forces people in afghanistan. we operated there. he was cooperative. we had over flight rights. it was enormous advantage to deal with a landlocked country we couldn't get in from the sea.

we had to have that kind of cooperation from somebody and particularly a country on the northern border of afghanistan. he was catching the dick enz from russia. russia puts pressure on all of those central asian countries and so does china and it makes their lives very difficult. he stepped out and agreed to be of help. the united states with our non-governmental organizations and our human rights groups saw the uzbekistan government put down the people who had had gone into the prison and released all of those prisoners and became judgmental without the facts in my view and said that there should be an international investigation and the implication was that the kareem off government and the uz beck government behaved in a manner inconsistent with human rights. i knew i didn't know the facts. i wasn't on the ground. i do know what the result was.

the result was that the president of uzbekistan threw us off the base. he said we know who our friends are. he went back to putin. now, why do i make that point? i make the point because if this is good, how we are, that's the theory, our judgment, if we're like us is good and this is bad, unlike us, my theory is if someone is on the spectrum and they may be over in the bad side, not the good side, but they're coming the right way, they're moving in the right direction, they're improving human rights, moving towards freer political or freer economic systems or both, that's a good thing and we ought to encourage that. instead we stuck a stick in his eye and went right back the other way. we disadvantaged the united states from a security standpoint and by the same token we disadvantaged the united

states and the people of uzbekistan by sending him back and not keeping the forward motion with respect to human rights and freer political and freer economic systems. so it is a matter of how you look at it. now, the reason i come to that conclusion and it is not the way people mostly look at things in the world, the reason i do is because if we're good, we weren't good, think of our country. think of what we went through. we had slaves into the 1800s. women didn't vote until the 1900s. we had a civil war. we killed hundreds of thousands of human beings, a terrible, terrible civil war. we didn't arrive this way. we're still evolving. those countries are evolving. they don't go from a dick at that to herral system to a free system in five minutes. it is a tough journey. it is a very tough journey. it was a tough journey for this

country, and we made enormous progress. we did the same thing with tak stan. mu shar off stepped up and supported us and the with a are on terror. he was very effective in scooping up terrorists in the cities of pakistan. not any good much at all in the federally administered tribal area. he sent his people in. tried to. got a couple hundred people killed in his army, trying to get in there. they have never controlled that part of the border between pakistan and afghanistan is wide open. our state department decided that it is important for musharraf to go to work in ifl civilian clothes instead of his army uniform 6789 our president goes to work in civilian clothes. why shouldn't everyone else? so they pointed a finger, told him he should get out of the army. he did, and he got thrown out of the country. the civilian government that came in is weaker, less helpful, and we run the risk of a failed state in pakistan with nuclear

weapons. it seems to me we have to use judgment and balance and not expect perfection and not expect other countries to be like we are because we weren't like we are over much of our history. it is just a fact. i look to see which direction the country is moving and hope that they're moving in a good direction. a war in the information age. afghanistan was the first war and iraq that were waged in the 21st sent try, the information age, enormous contrast from world war ii or korea. blackberrys, iphones, youtubes, all bearing images instance tansly around the world. think of it. it changes everything. people are amazing, human beings. we adjust and we accommodate and we learn to absorb things, and i mean, i grew up there was no television. suddenly there was television. it changed things. people adjusted to it, and now

we have all of these other things. 24 hour news. we still have a government basically an eight-hour a day government five days a week, and we haven't adjusted to the information age, and at any given moment of the day or night something is going on in the wo recalled that makes a difference to the united states of america. i give you one example. there was a report that a quran had been flushed down a toilet at guantanamo bay. there were riots in three countries and people were killed. dead. gone. now, a lie can race around the world in 30 seconds. while the truth is i think mark twain said the truth is still pulling its boots on, and what do you have to do? you have to find out did that happen? we can't lie. terrorists can lie. they have media committees, terrorists do. they sit down and plan media things so they can have events

that advantage them in the world by using the free press and the media. we can't do that. we don't. what happened? well, people died. weeks later "newsweek" magazine that carried the report that the quran had been flushed down the toilet at guantanamo found out the truth and the truth was it hadn't. it had not happened. it did not exist. they ran a little thing in "newsweek" this said, oh, to the accident tent our article was inaccurate, we're sorry. well, sorry, they're dead. i mean, the basic lead in the news business is if it bleeds, it leads. general casey, he tried to get positive news stories in iraq, and the papers weren't carrying positive stories. they were putting generators in hospitals and generators in schools and the stock market was open and they had a lot of free press, and so he said, my gosh,

there ought to be stories so we hired some people to write accurate stories, not lies, accurate stories, got them in the press. once it was found out in the united states that that was going on, the congress went crazy, shouldn't be doing that, that's a violation of freedom of speech and bang, it stopped. we could no longer put accurate stories in. i bet if i asked the people in the united states of america to do a poll how many people were water boarded at guantanamo, the answer would be some people would say probably 100, 200. others would say 10, 15. others might say i think i read three might have been. the answer is none. zero. not a single human being was water boarded by the u.s. armed forces in guantanamo or anywhere else to my knowledge for the purposes of interrogation. the cia did water board three people, but think of how that's all been conf lateed and what

the general opinion in america is about waterboarding and at guantanamo bay which is in my view one of the truly in the wo. zawahiri said more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. we're in the media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of muslims. lawfair, briefly. what is it. what's happening is that increasingly lawyers and prosecutors are using the concept of universal jurisdiction to file lawsuits against u.s. government officials and military personnel. they are putting american officials and intelligence officials at risk of legal action in attempt to intimidate them and their families to alter the behavior of theirs and of our country's. it is in effect an attempt to criminalize policy differences. it's a trend that threatens to

subordinate the american people, their elected leaders' actions as well as the u.s. military to foreign courts and rogue prosecutors. this is a sizable athlete american sovereignty. i'll give you one example. i was at a nato meeting in brussels and the -- i read in the paper that the belgium parliament passed a law that allowed any one in the u.s. military to be prosecuted in foreign courts. and i thought my goodness, that means we can't have military people go to belgium where nato is. if -- if any rogue prosecutor can decide he wants to enhance his public image he can file a lawsuit which he did against general franks as i recall, and so i called in the defense minister of belgium and not

being a diplomat i was not very diplomatic. and i explained that nato didn't have to be in belgium. and that we didn't have to be in belgium. and within a matter of weeks the legislation was defeated, nullified, withdrawn, and it stopped. but it happens all over the world. and my view is, it's a danger particularly not just for us but for the world. think of the contribution our military made in the tsunami in india. indonesia years back. think about the earthquake that took place in pakistan. our people did a superb humanitarian job. any time the u.n. or international organization has to deal with the humanitarian crisis they come to the department of defense, the united states of america and we give it. we wouldn't be able to do that if this universal jurisdiction

continued. we wouldn't want to send our military people on humanitarian mission they were going to be prosecuted in rogue courts all over the world. so, it is something that it seems to me even president obama who apparently is personally authorizing drone strikes, potentially could be vulnerable and i think people out to think about it. it would lead to isolation, isolationism on the part of our country and that would be a terrible, terrible thing for the world in my view. last, a few words about our institutions. at the inflection point of the end of world war ii and the beginning of the cold war, and the truman administration, most of the institutions that exist today were fashioned. here at home the defense department, the cia, the national security council,

internationally the world bank, the imf, north atlantic treaty organization, the united nations, all of those happened in that period and they have been serving us in varying ways over the decades since. we reach the ininflection point the end of the cold air and the beginning of the information age and the 21st century some time back and have not stepped up to adjust those institutions to fit the 21st century. and we need to. they are not working well. they are rusty and nato made some changes, it's been enlarged. the defense department made changes with goldwater-nichols. you would build an air force base next to the naval air stations. two within 15 seconds of each other. mindless. just mindless. separate runways, separate hangars, controllers, separate security. it was the dumbest thing in the

world. thanks to goldwater-nichols, much greater extent we're creating a joint force and achieving a leverage that is critically important. i think there ought to be a new hoover commission as there was i think in the '40s and 50s. the problems we face in the world are not going to be solved by one nation. problems like proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, piracy, drug trafficking, it's going to take us working with other countries and current institutions tu.n. with vetoes, nato, basically oriented internally than externally and the problems aren't internal today, they are external. i was in college in 1954. and add aly stevenson, no conservative, gave a speech. to my senior class. he said the following.

he said the power for good or evil of this american political organization is virtually beyond measurement. the decision it makes the uses to which it devotes its immense resources the leadership it provides on moral as well as material questions appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world. you dare not withhold your attention. if young americans do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability, america will stumble and if america stumbles, the world falls. it seems to me that those words are as true today as they were then. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> we'll be right back with a discussion and some questions and answers. this is conservative

intellectual tradition here at the citadel in charleston, south carolina. >> we're here at the citadel in south carolina, back with secretary don rumsfeld. and we're talking about the bush doctrine t war on terror. i'd like to start out by asking him, in what sense should the global military conflict with radical islam be seen as recapitulation of the cold war? >> i don't usually use five sill a boll words like recapitulation. i think that the -- there is a greater similarity to the struggle against violent extremists, so called war on terror, similarity between that and the cold war than world war i or world war ii or korea. >> what are the lessons, how do

they apply? >> one lesson seems to me is that we have to recognize it's not going to be one with bullets, it's going to be won in a competition of ideas, an effort not simply by the department of defense or people with weapons. but by all elements of national power. finding ways to get that battle to be fought within the muslim faith. the overwhelming majority of the people who are muslims in the world are not going to learn how to strap on suicide vests and kill people. and they are not determined to re-establish a talifat and end the notion of nation states. they are people who are practicing their religion. but a small minority in there is. and the likelihood of non-muslims to be able to persuade that group of extremists not to be extreme and

to live within the nation state concept that our world has, seems to me is small. i don't think we're going to win that from the outside of that faith. i think we have to find ways to support people in that faith so that they, in fact, and it's risky, don't get me wrong. they get killed if they say the wrong thing or if they do the wrong thing or they say things to authorities that are inconsistent with what the extremists want. they put their lives at risk and families at risk. i think in that sense it is much more like the cold war. >> what lessons from the cold war do not apply? how -- >> i thought of one that does apply, another. we have to be patient. this isn't going to wend a signing ceremony on the uss missouri. this isn't going to end in two, three years. it takes time. cold war took decades and we have to expect that this is going to take time.