"The ground of liberty must be gained by inches. It will not be won overnight."
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President
Donald Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, has written an op-ed for the N.Y. Times titled "The Price of Freedom in Iraq," in which he makes the case for American involvement in the Middle East. Registration is required in order to view it, but it's brief and not too much trouble.
In explaining why we're in Iraq, he references a trip he made to South Korea during the time when their government was debating whether to send troops to help us. He cites a question posed to him by a Korean journalist: "Why should Koreans send their young people halfway around the globe to be killed or wounded in Iraq?"
Rumsfeld answered the young journalist with a question of his own. He doesn't indicate how the young lady responded, but details how he compared her country's freedom to that of her neighbor to the north. He told her about a night-time satellite photo of the Korean peninsula which he keeps in his Pentagon office. In that photo the North is in almost total darkness, while the South is ablaze with light. That light, which he calls the light of freedom, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. "Was it worth it?" he asks, and answers his question in the affirmative.
"You bet. Just as it was worth it in Germany and France and Italy and in the Pacific in World War II. And just as it is worth it in Afghanistan and Iraq today...Americans do not come easily to war, but neither do Americans take freedom lightly...when freedom and self-government have taken root in Iraq, and that country becomes a force for good in the Middle East, the rightness of those efforts will be just as clear as it is today in Korea, Germany, Japan and Italy."
Read the whole thing, and if you'd like to take a look at the night-time shot of Korea to which Rumsfeld refers, you can find it here. Just scroll to the right.
3 comments:
Great post. This is just another example of how the left just can't - or wont - look at the Iraq war from an objective viewpoint. Some are so FAR to the left, they actually think (well, they don't /really/ "think") that moderates are extreme right-wing fanatics.
These are the same kind of people that build their home in a new housing development, then complain when the next guy cuts another tree down to build his house. They are the source of their own bewilderment!
This is the same Rumsfeld who wanted to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11 because there weren't any good targets in Afghanistan.
Nice to see he's still asking himself the questions he wants to answer and the rationale for the war is still taking shape.
You must have seen the Leslie Stahl interview of Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes tonight. Since I wasn't in the particular Cabinet meeting where Secretary Rumsfeld reportedly suggested it might be time to attack Iraq, I'll have to pass on what transpired. As in any meeting where the response to a crisis is being discussed, I would imagine many approaches were discussed before a decision was reached about starting with Afghanistan first.
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