Posted on 10/16/2003 8:51:55 AM PDT by TrebleRebel
Address by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Simi Valley, California Friday, October 10, 2003
Thank you very much. Please be seated. Thank you.
Fred, thank you. I appreciate that very generous introduction. It kind of makes me sound like I can't hold a job. (Laughter.)
Mark, and thank you so much, and all of you for what you do to help people across the world to know more about the values, the leadership and the accomplishments of President Ronald Reagan. We appreciate what you're doing with his library and the foundation.
Pete Wilson, good to see you always. Thank you for your service to the country and, certainly, your assistance to me as a member of the Defense Policy Board. (Applause.)
Mrs. Reagan, you are a beacon of courage. And Joyce and I have such respect for you and for all you do, and for taking such loving care of our great president, Ronald Reagan. (Applause.) You bring such grace -- both of you bring such grace and dignity -- both in public life and private life, in the White House and out of the White House. America loves and appreciates you both so much.
Well, this is a full house! (Laughter.) Thank you all for being here. It's a privilege for me to be able to stop here and have a chance to see the library, and say hello to some old friends sitting here, and to see so many of you.
I first met President Reagan back in 1974, when I was working with Gerald Ford. And I remember we had a lunch at your home, I believe, Mrs. Reagan, and had a nice visit. I also remember there was a point where President Ford asked me to very quietly, without embarrassing anybody, to go visit President -- or, Governor Reagan and see if -- I guess he was former Governor Reagan at that point, and see if he might have an interest in joining President Ford's Cabinet. And he didn't want to do it in a public way and he didn't want to make it awkward. And he knew that President Reagan was thinking of challenging him, but he wanted to try to bring the party together. So he went to -- I went into a hotel room -- I think it was the Madison Hotel -- and met with President Reagan, and we had a visit.
And I failed. (Laughter.)
But Governor Reagan was as gracious as always, but he graciously declined.
Of course, President Reagan went on to win the nomination in 1980. And during his administration, as you mentioned, I had the opportunity to serve in a variety of different commissions and boards, to serve as his special envoy for the Middle East. And through it all, I had the chance to work with him and see the clarity of his leadership.
Someone asked me, "What's the most distinctive thing about President Reagan?" And I said that his leadership was directional. He had a way of getting people's eyes up off their shoelaces and out to the horizon. And you almost could feel him planting a flag, a standard, miles down the road, so that people could see it and track towards it. He did it with words. He did it with actions. But he did it brilliantly. And it was that leadership that elevated all of us and helped change the world.
Today, in so many ways, our country continues to benefit from Ronald Reagan's remarkable tenure as president. The accomplishments of any president are really built on the foundation that was left to him by his predecessors. You come into office, and you have to work with that which was left to you. And what you do during your time in office rarely benefits and enables you; it tends to plant seeds in the ground that then enable future presidents and future Congresses and future generations to build off of that.
But the foundation that is left to any President by his predecessors is a result of the decisions they made, the investments they made in military capabilities, the leadership they exercised, and importantly, the world they left behind.
In each of these areas, all of us today owe a true debt of gratitude to President Reagan. And today, as we fight the global war on terror, our goal is to leave the world freer and safer than we found it -- just as President Reagan did, to our great benefit.
When President Bush visited this library in 1999, he said, "We live in the nation that President Reagan restored and the world he helped to save." It is a truth that today, in the light of history, even critics cannot deny.
But the Reagan years are more than a moment in history to be remembered and admired, though they are that to be sure. The Reagan legacy is in fact a living legacy, one that continues to benefit and guide our great country.
Of course we continue to reap the benefits of historic defense investments made during the Reagan years, which produced many of the capabilities that have been so critical to our successes both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
It was President Reagan who had the vision to see the emerging ballistic missile threat and insist that free people not remain defenseless against it. I was privileged to be in the White House that evening when he made the announcement. I remember the late Dr. Ed Teller was there. And he announced what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. And today, under President Bush's leadership, we have revitalized the missile defense research, development and testing, and we're on track to begin deploying the first rudimentary missile defenses, we hope, in the latter portion of next year.
But President Reagan left a legacy more powerful than any weapon. He really did do so much to restore our nation's confidence in principled American leadership around the world. He dared to call the Soviet Union what it was -- an Evil Empire -- and in doing so, he reminded the entire world that evil does exist; that peaceful coexistence with it is neither possible nor desirable; and that if we have the will, the determination and the patience, it can be defeated. And it was.
Like President Reagan, President Bush has not shied from calling evil by its name or declaring his intention to defeat its latest incarnation -- terrorism -- just as free men and women of all political persuasions, here and abroad, defeated fascism and communism before.
When President Reagan came to office, Soviet Communism was on the march and our country was still weakened by the experience of the Vietnam War, and a lingering fear of the projection of American power. President Reagan saw the danger. He knew that weakness is provocative.
One of his most important strategic innovations was the idea that to roll back the communist expansion, America need not send a half a million U.S. troops to every trouble spot where freedom was threatened. In many cases, there were people in those countries who were willing to fight and die for their own freedom. It was Ronald Reagan's genius to make common cause with those freedom fighters, providing them with arms, training, intelligence and other support.
In Afghanistan, President Bush built on that notion. He did not send in massive armies to march and occupy the country of Afghanistan, as the Soviet Union had. Indeed, if you think about it, the Soviets put 300,000 troops into Afghanistan and lost. They had another 160,000 in the three countries just north, in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Rather, President Bush made common cause with the Afghan fighters, providing them the support necessary to turn the battle around. He sent in teams of special operations forces and provided them with close-air support as they rode into battle, often on horseback.
Some people said that "Rumsfeld's so old, that's his idea of transformation." (Laughter.) "He wants to bring back the cavalry." (Laughter.)
In Iraq, it would have been impossible for Iraqis to overthrow that regime without significant numbers of coalition forces. Still, we've kept our footprint relatively modest. In the north, Special Operations forces teamed up with Kurdish freedom fighters, tying down Saddam Hussein's northern units, capturing Mosul and helping to unravel the northern front in rapid order. And today, as the coalition battles regime remnants and foreign terrorists in Iraq, they are doing so side by side with Iraqis, who have stepped forward to fight for their future.
Since liberation of Iraq, some 80,000 Iraqis have been armed and trained in a matter of five months, and they're participating in the defense of their country. Ten-thousand more are in training as police, army, site-protection forces, civil defense forces, border patrols. They, in a sense, are freedom fighters as well. And they are not simply observing or helping. These 80,000 Iraqis since May 1st, working closely with coalition forces, have suffered 67 killed in battle, and they've suffered more than 115 wounded in action. So they too are on the front line in the global war on terror, as they should be. It's their country, and they will -- to the extent we can be still more successful in training additional Iraqis to take over security of that country, they will be able to provide for their own security in Iraq.
But perhaps the most important way we benefit from President Reagan's legacy today is from the expansion of human freedom that took place with his leadership. When this library was opened, I'm told one of the first exhibits was a simple wall on which was inscribed the chronology of the dates and events beginning in 1989 as one nation after the next through off the shackles of tyranny and embraced democracy and self-government.
The exhibit was called "The World that Ronald Reagan Left Us."
I arrived this morning from Colorado Springs, where the United States hosted a meeting of the NATO defense ministers. At that meeting of the 19 NATO nations were three former Warsaw Pact adversaries: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, now NATO allies. Also present, interestingly, were seven former East Bloc nations: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia, nations that have been invited to join NATO and will becoming part of that alliance in the early part of next year. The membership of those recently-free nations is changing the alliance. It is injecting a new energy into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a new love of freedom which can really possibly only come from nations that so recently were enslaved.
That's the world that Ronald Reagan left us.
Or take the coalition in Iraq. It now includes military forces from 32 nations. Consider some of the countries that are contributing troops in Iraq today: Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. They all have forces in Iraq assisting the coalition. There are others, as well, but I just mention these because those are the nations helping in Iraq today that President Reagan helped to make free.
Why are so many of these nations, many small, most not very wealthy, sending their forces, their young men and women put at risk halfway around the world to help bring freedom to the Iraqi people? I suspect it's because so many of them have just recovered their own freedom, and they're eager, they're proud to help the Iraqi people recover theirs.
God bless them all, and God bless Ronald Reagan for what he did to help liberate them. (Applause.)
In a sense, their contributions are important in another way. They demonstrate that the seeds of freedom, when planted, can do more than simply take root where they're sown. They can have the power to spread freedom across the globe to other countries.
My friend Dr. Marty Anderson, who's also on the Defense Policy Board with Pete, came to me one day, some -- many, many months back and told me about a remarkable treasure trove of President Reagan's letters that had been found. And he began looking at them, and I understand they've since been published.
One in particular is worth mentioning here. It's a letter he wrote by hand in April of 1981 to Soviet leader Brezhnev. Brezhnev had sent him a letter accusing the United States of destabilizing the world with its territorial ambitions and imperialistic designs. President Reagan replied, quote:
"There's not only no evidence to support such a charge; there's solid evidence that the United States, when it could have dominated the world, at no risk to itself, made no effort whatsoever to do so.
"When World War II ended, the United States had the only undamaged industrial power in the world," he wrote. "Its military was at its peak, and we alone had the ultimate weapon, the nuclear bomb, and the unquestioned ability to deliver it anywhere in the world. If we had sought world domination, who could have opposed us?"
He went on to say, "But the United States followed a different course, one unique in the history of all mankind. We used our power and wealth to rebuild the war-ravaged economies of the world, including those nations that had been our enemies," unquote.
Think of what he wrote and the power of the truth he spoke.
Because of those efforts after World War II, freedom did take root in Japan, in Germany and Italy and indeed across Europe. And the liberated nations of Europe then joined with the United States to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Together we stood up to the forces of communist tyranny, and by the end of the 20th century, liberty had sped -- spread across the entire continent of Europe and beyond.
When President Bush spoke here, he pointed out that in 1941 there were only about a dozen democracies on the face of the Earth, and by the close of the 20th century, there were more than 120. Today many of those recently liberated nations are now at the forefront of the effort to help Iraq and Afghan peoples recover their freedom and maintain them. And if we are steadfast, free societies can take root in those countries and we will have still new allies in the battle for freedom and moderation in the Middle East.
The Marshall Plan President Reagan spoke of in his letter to Brezhnev cost roughly $90 billion in today's dollars. That $90 billion investment helped transform a region that had been a source of violent war and instability for centuries and turn it into a place of peace and prosperity and, I would add, mutually beneficial trade. Today some have understandably asked, why should the American people, taxpayers, pay $20 billion to help Iraq get on a path of stability, democracy and self-government? The reason, I would submit, is because it's in our interest and it's in the interest of the free world.
And I also suspect that that's what Ronald Reagan would say.
Today America carries on the mission that animated President Reagan's life and his presidency: very simply, the defense of human freedom. And looking at what has been accomplished in the past two years -- tyrannies defeated, nations rescued, millions of people liberated, 46 million in those two countries -- and I suspect he would approve.
Thank you. God bless you. And as President Reagan always said, God bless the United States of America.
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