During the conference (on October 23) I asked Mr. Rumsfeld a question crafted by the students in my strategy seminar at the University of Texas.
Last night I received by email a partial transcript of the on-the-record portion of the lunch conference. Here’s my students’ question and part of Mr. Rumsfeld’s answer. The question sparked a long rambling, discussion about “coalition-type” (multilateral) political, diplomatic, and military action throughout the world. Understand you are looking at “raw” transcript– complete with stutters, parenthetical statements, etc..
AUSTIN BAY: Mr. Secretary, this is a question that my students at the University of Texas wanted me to ask you. I had them — they came up with a seminar — a strategy and strategic theory seminar, 12 kids in there, they came up with 10 questions and voted on it, and this is the one they came up with. So I want to ask you — it’s a little bit of a shift from what everyone else is saying, but maybe it’s not.
“North Korea is multilateral diplomacy. Perceptually” — this is the way they put it — “Perceptually” — because I thought you would reject the premise that Iraq was unilateral, so they put the word perceptually in. “Perceptually, Iraq is unilateral. Why this perception? What have been the costs politically, domestically and internationally of this condition, that is unilateralism in Iraq, or at least the perception of it?”
That’s from a bunch of smart 20-year-olds.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Huh. Well, let’s start with the facts. The facts are that after 9/11, the president started putting together a worldwide coalition in the global war on terror which was — today it’s over 80 countries, recognizing that terrorism, like proliferation, like narcotics, are problems that the world faces that can’t be dealt with alone. No one country can manage the counter-proliferation problem alone, for example.
He then, in Iraq, created the — the perception was created that it was unilateral because even though the U.N. resolutions, even though the Congress of the United States said back in the ’90s in the Clinton administration, for regime change there — the perception was created because basically two or three countries were quite adamant and opposed — their opposition to do anything.
The fact is there’s 32 countries helping us right now in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, there are 42, including NATO, which is 26 of the 42. So they are multilateral in that sense.
There’s — you know, in Korea — which is the premise of your question — being multinational, it’s six countries that have been working on it. They’re going to the UN and trying to get more countries to do something besides just say something. And it’s pretty obvious in the case of Korea, it seems to me, that the international community says it does not want to lower the nuclear threshold, they do not want more nuclear nations, they do want to see nuclear proliferation, they do want nuclear weapons or dangerous, lethal weapons to get in the hands of non-state entities and terrorist groups, and yet their lack of cohesion, their lack of cohesiveness has created a situation where the leverage on North Korea is obviously inadequate to the task. And that is what the president’s working on. He’s trying to see that there would be sufficient cohesiveness in the international community so that it would be adequate to the task of dissuading them.
And thus far, you have one good example in Libya that has set aside their nuclear ambitions. And you’ve got Iran and North Korea that have not. I don’t want to get distracted from your question, and I’ll come back to it because it’s a worthwhile question. It seems to me that if you think of the nuclear deterrent, historically it works against a nation-state presumably that has a population and a leadership class and an industrial base they’d rather not lose.
Against a non-state entity — I mean, you think of all Iran gave to Hezbollah — against a non-state entity, traditional nuclear deterrents tend not to be recognized as having much effect.
Second, against a state entity that has a martyrdom complex and may be willing to have chaos and turmoil in the world, the standard deterrents many not work as well, one would think. But it strikes me that the president’s efforts to try to get sufficient — and if you think of North Korea, it is very different from Iran. And it is — you know, there’s — people are starving. They have people going in the military that are under five feet and less than a hundred pounds because of the lack of nutrition in the country. The same people, North and South, same resources, North and South, no reason for it.
And so one would think that if those six countries and the rest of the world, the U.N. and the international community, could develop enough leverage that it would affect them. It’s not likely to do much less of an effect on Iran, I would surmise.
But — so I think the approach — it is — the approach for North Korea it seems to me to be appropriate for North Korea. And I think the biggest risk they pose — it’s not that they pose no risk to South Korea or others because of their nuclear detonation, but the real risk to them is they’ll sell anything at their risk is as a proliferator both of missile technologies as well as now nuclear technologies.
Well, I didn’t really answer your question very well.
AUSTIN BAY: Because it comes back to the perception issue. And if Iraq is indeed a multilateral effort — which I happen to think it is — but this is the way the students –
SEC RUMSFELD: Sure.
AUSTIN BAY: — I know it is because of — from what I’ve done –
SEC RUMSFELD: We’ve been there.
AUSTIN BAY: — exactly — and who I worked with. But this — again, this is a 20-year-old’s perception of something. Why has that not been counteracted politically or information wise by the administration, at least effectively?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, the –
AUSTIN BAY: Are you paying a domestic price for it or are you paying an international price for it? And that’s what –
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, sure. Both, yeah. Both, yeah.
Check out the entire column.
