up describing as dark winter where they theorized the placing of small pox in three locations in the united states, major metropolitan hubs with air terminals, and within a year it concluded, this independent study concluded that there would be more than a million americans

dead as a result of that, not a nuclear attack, not a chemical attack, but in effect a biological attack and not a complicated one, not something that takes a lot of money or a lot of skill sets. imagine a million people. imagine our country if the goal of terrorism is to terrorize and alter your behavior, imagine what the behavior pattern would have been in our country. there would be marshal law. you would have people guarding state boundaries to try to avoid. when i grew up, if you had small pox or chickenpox or measles they put a quarantine sign on your house and you weren't allowed to go out and no one was allowed to go in your house. this was in the 1930s.

you can imagine the whole country do doing that, petrified because of the lack of protection against small pox. that was very much in the president's mind and in the people in government's minds that that danger that 3,000 was a terrible, terrible event, but that a million because of small pox and the ease, relative ease of imposing that kind of lethality on our society by people, not armed countries, not major armys, navys or air forces, so the structure the president put in place, mixture of things, the patriot act, military commissions, guantanamo

bay, these were military commissions were old. they had been going on in our country since george washington. there was nothing really new about that. the armed forces of the united

states had experience managing detention of prisoners of war, people who wore uniforms, carried their weapons openly, had a command structure. all they had to say was their name, rank and serial number and they could not give you any additional information nor could you get any additional information unless they decided

they wanted to give it to you. that was what the armed forces was organized and trained and equipped to do. we were not organized, trained or equipped to deal with terror. nor in an environment where the lethality as dark winter suggested was as grave for our country. so everyone was dealing with a new circumstance as was the president. the president made a decision to go after the terrorists in afghanistan, and we put together a plan with the central

intelligence agency where with very small number of u.s. military forces and a very small number of cia people and a lot of assistance, supplies going to the northern alliance and some militias in the south were able to defeat the taliban government 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 perspiring 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 anticipatory self-defense was mentioned or preemption. 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 kind. that caused the president to fashion what became known as a bush doctrine in part of anticipatory 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 threaty 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 anticipatory self-defense. let me mention the freedom agenda. president bush in his second inaugural address said america's vital interests are now 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 misimpressioned, 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 karimov, a member in the old soviet union and he was no democrat to be sure.

he was an authoritarian 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 karimov, 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 dickens 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 uzbek 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 dictatorial 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 takistan. musharoff stepped up and supported us and the war 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 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 instantaneously 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 world 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. 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 conflated and what the general opinion in america is about water boarding and at guantanamo bay which is in my view one of the truly impressive prison systems in the world, and zahiri once 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.

law fair. they're putting them at risk in an attempt to intimidate them and their families. it a trend that threatens subordinate people to foreign courts and rogue prosecutors. this is a sizable threat to american sovereignty. i'll give you one example. i was at a nato meeting in brussels. i read in the paper that the belgium legislate yourself parliament had passed a law that allowed anyone in the u.s. military to be prosecuted in foreign courts. i thought, my goodness, that

means we can't have military people go to belgium. if any prog prosecutor wants to enhance his public image, he can file a lawsuit, which he did against general franks as i recall. so you called in the french minister of belgium. not being a diplomat, i was not very diplomatic. and i explained that nato didn't have to be in belgium and that woo 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. 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. think what we did with the earthquakes that took place in

pakistan. our people went in and did ka superb job, humanitarian job. any time anyone wants help, they come to the united states and we do it. we want to to send our people on humanitarian missions if they were going to prosecuted in rogue courts all over the country -- all over the world. so it is something that seems to me, even president obama, who apparently is personally authorizing drone strikes potentially could be vulnerable i think people ought to think about it. it would lead to isolation for the country and that would be a terrible thing in my view.

at the inflexion point of world war ii and the end of the cold war and the truman administration, the defense department, the cia, the national security council, internationally the world bank, imf, united nations, all of those things happened in that period. and they have been serling us in various ways over the decades since. we reached the inflexion points at the end of the cold war and beginning of the information age and we have not stepped up to adjust those institutions to fit the 24 1st century and we need . they are not working well. they are rusty. nato made changes, the defense department made changes.

in the old days you'd build two naval stayings within 15 minutes of each other. mindless, mindless. thanks to goldwater-nichols, we're achieving leverage that's critically important. i think there ought to be a new hoover commission as there was i think in the 40s or 50s to look at these institutions and make recommendations. the problems we face in the world are not problems that are going to be solved by one nation, problems like proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, piracy, drug trafficking. it going to take working with other countries and the current institution, the u.n. with its vetoes, nato oriented internally rather than, external.

i was in college in 1964 and adalaide stevenson gave a speech. he said you dare no with hold your attention. if young americans do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability, america will stumble. and if america stumble, the world falls. it is -- 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 question and questions and answers. we're here at the citadel in charleston, south carolina. we're here at the citadel in charleston, south carolina and we're here with donald rumsfeld talking about the bush doctrine and the war on terror. i'd like to start out asking in what sense should global