Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made an emotional defense of the US-led war on Iraq but acknowledged that it has taken a toll on the US image in the world.
"I know in my heart and my brain that America ain't what's wrong in the world," he told an audience of defense and foreign policy luminaries here that included some the fiercest European opponents of the war.
Rumsfeld spoke shortly after German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told the same audience that events in Iraq had proven Germany's anti-war position to be right.
But Fischer said that everyone would be losers if the US coalition in Iraq were to fail now.
[Particularly the German economy, selfish b*st*rds!--Jen]
Despite his "deep skepticism," the German minister said that Berlin would not stand in the way of deeper NATO involvement in Iraq [As if they could...!--J.T.] but it would send no troops of its own.
The debate came at the annual Munich security conference in this southern German city.
Rumsfeld defended the war in emotional terms as an action to free a brutalized people from a tyrant who passed up a final opportunity to fully disarm under the terms of UN Security Council resolutions.
At one point, he appeared to choke up on the podium as he recounted seeing the name of a high school friend on a memorial to US dead in the 1950-53 Korean war.
He recalled being questioned later by a South Korean journalist who asked why Koreans should go all the way to Iraq to risk death.
"That would have been a fair question for an American journalist to ask. Why in the world should an American go halfway around the world to Korea to be wounded or die?"
"We were in a building that looked out over the city of Seoul. I said, 'I'll tell you why. Look out that window.' And out that window you could see life, and cars and energy," he said.
Rumsfeld skirted questions about the US failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a key rationale for the US invasion.
[Only to the Liberal Lying Left media and their cohorts in the DNC.]
Asked about the intelligence failures, Rumsfeld said it was a question of critical importance that would be looked at by a commission named Friday by President George W. Bush.
But he argued that preemptive military action had to be weighed in a world in which terrorists and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction raised the prospects of thousands of people being killed in attacks.
"If someone is going to throw a snowball, you may not want to have a preemptive attack," he said. "You can afford to take the blow, and live with it and do something after the fact."
As you go upscale from snowball to weapons of mass destruction, at some point where the risk gets high enough it's not going to be a snowball in your face," he said.
"It could be a biological weapon that is going to kill tens of thousands of human beings. Then you have to ask yourself if you have an obligation to take the blow and do something afterwards."
Rumsfeld acknowledged an assertion that the US image in the world had been hurt but blamed it on media coverage, which he called "shocking, absolutely shocking."
[I quite agree, Secretary Rumsfeld. I, too, am shocked on an almost daily basis by their bias and not-so-hidden agenda.--Jen]
"To think what was going on in Iraq a year ago with people being tortured, rape rooms, mass graves, gross corruption, a country that had used chemical weapons on its own people, used them on their neighbors, defiant to the United Nations through 17 security council resolutions," he said.
"And look at the way it was treated in the press. There were prominent people who represent countries in this room who opined that they didn't think it made a hell of a lot of difference who won," he said.
[Remember when France's Dominique de VILEpin said during the Iraq war that he didn't care if our Coalition won? Worse still, I think he may have indicated that he wanted Saddam to prevail...--Jen]
Fischer defended Germany's decision not to join the US-coalition.
Being that Fischer's a former terrorist and member of the Beider Meinhoff gang, we wouldn't want to get too "in your face" with terrorism, would we?
SecDef Rumsfeld here, as ever, conducts himself as an officer and a gentleman.
Rumsfeld is a good, decent man who both knows the personal cost of war and feels deeply the slights to our good country and our efforts to help our fellow human beings, even though they be in the guise of military action.
He's not about to let "old Europe" forget how they stabbed America, the West and the Iraqi people in the back with their craven stance of appeasement when it came time to act on Saddam's bellicosity and defiance.
I love President Bush and his terrific Administration, starting with VP Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld.
Good, decent, patriotic, imminently capable and Freedom-loving men and women all!
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