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A DITHERING DEMAGOGUING WHITE HOUSE THAT IS A DANGER TO AMERICA |
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Written by Dick Cheney
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Friday, 23 October 2009 |
[This is the full text
of former Vice-President Dick Cheney's speech at the Center for Security Policy award dinner in Washington on October 21, 2009. To
The Point salutes Dick Cheney for his courage, honesty, and great contributions
to America who should today be in the White House in
place of the anti-American impostor currently occupying it.]
Thank you all very much. Its a pleasure to be here, and especially to receive
the Keeper of the Flame Award in the company of so many good friends.
I'm told that among those you've recognized before me was my
friend Don Rumsfeld. I don't mind that a bit. It fits something of a pattern. In a career that includes being [White House]
chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven't had much that
Don didn't get first.
But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald
Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such
a distinguished list. To Frank Gaffney and all the supporters of Center for
Security Policy, I thank you for this honor.
And I thank you for the great energy and high intelligence
you bring to as vital a cause as there is -- the advance of freedom and the
uncompromising defense of the United States.
Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly
comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who
came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your
predecessors. You inherit relationships
with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and
even generations earlier.
With the authority you hold for a little while, you have
great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is
always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of
your country's word.
So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present
administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe
to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith. It is certainly not a model of diplomacy when
the leaders of Poland
and the Czech Republic
are informed of such a decision at the last minute in midnight phone calls.
It took a long time and lot of political courage in those
countries to arrange for our interceptor system in Poland
and the radar system in the Czech Republic.
Our Polish and Czech friends are entitled to wonder how strategic plans and
promises years in the making could be dissolved, just like that with apparently little, if any, consultation.
Seventy years to the day after the Soviets invaded Poland,
it was an odd way to mark the occasion.
You hardly have to go back to 1939 to understand why these countries
desire and thought they had a close and trusting relationship with the United
States. Only last year, the Russian Army
moved into Georgia,
under the orders of a man who regards the collapse of the Soviet
Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.
Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world
knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by
conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but
more trouble.
What did the Obama Administration get from Russia
for its abandonment of Poland
and the Czech Republic,
and for its famous Reset button? Another
deeply flawed election and continued Russian opposition to sanctioning Iran
for its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In the short of it, President Obama's cancellation of America's
agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the
hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans.
For twenty years, these peoples have done nothing but strive
to move closer to us, and to gain the opportunities and security that America
offered. These are faithful friends and NATO allies, and they deserve better.
The impact of making two NATO allies walk the plank wont be felt only in Europe.
Our friends throughout the world are watching and wondering
whether America
will abandon them as well.
Big events turn on the credibility of the United
States
doing what we said we would do, and always defending our fundamental
security interests. In that category belong the ongoing missions in Iraq
and Afghanistan,
and the need to counter the nuclear ambitions of the current regime in Iran.
Candidate Obama declared last year that he would be willing to sit down with Iran's
leader without preconditions. As
President, he has committed America
to an Iran
strategy that seems to treat engagement as an objective rather than a tactic.
Time and time again, he has outstretched his hand to the
Islamic Republic's authoritarian leaders, and all the while Iran
has continued to provide lethal support to extremists and terrorists who are
killing American soldiers in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
The Islamic Republic continues to provide support to
extremists in Syria,
Lebanon, and
the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, the regime continues to spin
centrifuges and test missiles. And these are just the activities we know about.
I have long been skeptical of engagement with the current regime in Tehran,
but even Iran
experts who previously advocated for engagement have changed their tune since
the rigged elections this past June and the brutal suppression of Iran's
democratic protestors.
The administration clearly missed an opportunity to stand
with Iran's
democrats, whose popular protests represent the greatest challenge to the
Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. Instead, the President has been
largely silent about the violent crackdown on Iran's
protestors, and has moved blindly forward to engage Iran's
authoritarian regime.
Unless the Islamic Republic fears real consequences from the
United States and
the international community, it is hard to see how diplomacy will work.
Next door in Iraq,
it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops,
not undermine the progress we've made in recent years.
Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday (10/20) with President
Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan.
When he finally got around to talking about Iraq,
he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S.
troops from Iraq.
Former President Bush's bold decision to change strategy in Iraq
and surge U.S.
forces there set the stage for success in that country.
Iraq
has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and
an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle
East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this
young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.
We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan.
For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much
unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of
contrast to Iraq,
which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong.
Now suddenly, and despite our success in Iraq,
we're hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan.
These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same
short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected
for the same reasons of national security.
Having announced his Afghanistan
strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and
unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to
complete his mission.
President Obama has said he understands the stakes for America.
When he announced his new strategy he couched the need to succeed in the
starkest possible terms, saying, quote, "If the Afghan government falls to the
Taliban, or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged,
that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as
many of our people as they possibly can." End quote.
Five months later, in August of this year, speaking at the VFW, the President
made a promise to Americas
armed forces.
"I will give you a clear mission," he said, "defined goals,
and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That's my
commitment to you."
It's time for President Obama to make good on his promise.
The White House must stop dithering while America's
armed forces are in danger.
Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington
hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the
ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.
Recently, President Obama's advisors have decided that it's easier to blame the
Bush Administration than support our troops.
This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go
unanswered. The President's chief of staff [Rahm Emanuel] claimed that the Bush
Administration hadn't asked any tough questions about Afghanistan,
and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to
put together a strategy.
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed
by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a
team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and
recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama's team.
They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we
agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.
The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on
counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking
resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision -- a good
one, I think -- and sent a commander into the field to implement it.
Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to
implement the strategy they embraced. It's time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a
war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.
It's worth recalling that we were engaged in Afghanistan
in the 1980s, supporting the Mujahadeen against the Soviets.
That was a successful policy, but then we pretty much put Afghanistan
out of our minds. While no one was watching, what followed was a civil war, the takeover by the
Taliban, and the rise of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
All of that set in motion the events of 9/11.
When we deployed forces eight years ago this month, it was
to make sure Afghanistan
would never again be a training ground for the killing of Americans. Saving
untold thousands of lives is still the business at hand in this fight.
And the success of our mission in Afghanistan
is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough
political courage.
Then there's the matter of how to handle the terrorists we capture in this
ongoing war.
Some of them know things that, if shared, can save a good
many innocent lives. When we faced that problem in the days and years after
9/11, we made some basic decisions. We
understood that organized terrorism is not just a law-enforcement issue, but a
strategic threat to the United States.
At every turn, we understood as well that the safety of the country required
collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. We had a lot
of blind spots and that's an awful
thing, especially in wartime.
With many thousands of lives potentially in the balance, we
didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own
good time, if they answered them at all.
The intelligence professionals who got the answers we needed from terrorists
had limited time, limited options, and careful legal guidance. They got the
baddest actors we picked up to reveal things they really didn't want to share.
In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, by the time it was
over he was not was not only talking, he was practically conducting a seminar,
complete with chalkboards and charts. It turned out he had a professorial side, and our guys didn't mind at all if
classes ran long.
At some point, the mastermind of 9/11 became an expansive
briefer on the operations and plans of al-Qaeda. It happened in the course of enhanced
interrogations. All the evidence, and common sense as well, tells us why he
started to talk.
The debate over intelligence gathering in the seven years after 9/11 involves
much more than historical accuracy. What
we're really debating are the means and resolve to protect this country over
the next few years, and long after that. Terrorists and their state sponsors
must be held accountable, and America
must remain on the offensive against them.
We got it right after 9/11. And our government needs to keep
getting it right, year after year, president after president, until the danger
is finally overcome.
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters
it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term,
when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after
9/11 was a fading memory.
Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget
the terrible harm that had been done to America and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to
something much bigger and far worse.
Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most
of this time on the defensive and every
attempt to strike inside the United States
has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the
intelligence community asking, How did you do it? What were the keys to
preventing another attack over that period of time?
Instead, they've chosen a different path entirely giving in to the angry left, slandering
people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any
other they'll face in these four years.
No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can
promise you this:
There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for
the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.
On the political left, it will still be asserted that tough interrogations did
no good, because this is an article of faith for them, and actual evidence is
unwelcome and disregarded.
President Obama himself has ruled these methods out, and
when he last addressed the subject he filled the air with vague and useless
platitudes. His preferred device is to suggest that we could have gotten the
same information by other means. We're invited to think so.
But this ignores the hard, inconvenient truth that we did
try other means and techniques to elicit information from Khalid Sheikh
Muhammed and other al-Qaeda operatives, only turning to enhanced techniques
when we failed to produce the actionable intelligence we knew they were withholding.
In fact, our intelligence professionals, in urgent
circumstances with the highest of stakes, obtained specific information,
prevented specific attacks, and saved American lives.
In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to
disregard the program's legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations
are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in
our country's name and in our country's cause.
What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation
in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no
middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.
For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United
States has never lost its moral
bearings and least of all can that be
said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they
have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
Last January 20th, our successors in office were given the highest honors that
the voters of this country can give any two citizens.
Along with that, George W. Bush and I handed the new
president and vice president both a record of success in the war on terror, and
the policies to continue that record and ultimately prevail.
We had been the decision makers, but those seven years, four
months, and nine days without another 9/11 or worse, were a combined
achievement: a credit to all who serve in the defense of America,
including some of the finest people I've ever met.
What the present administration does with those policies is their call to make,
and will become a measure of their own record.
But I will tell you straight that I am not encouraged when
intelligence officers who acted in the service of this country find themselves
hounded with a zeal that should be reserved for America's
enemies. And it certainly is not a good sign when the Justice Department is set
on a political mission to discredit, disbar, or otherwise persecute the very
people who helped protect our nation in the years after 9/11.
There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be
answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them. We cannot
protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on
our own guys.
We cannot hope to win a war by talking down our country and those who do its
hardest work the men and women of our
military and intelligence services.
They are, after all, the true keepers of the flame.
Thank you very much.
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