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Rumsfeld: War critics haven't learned from history

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published August 30, 2006

SALT LAKE CITY - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces "a new type of fascism" and likened critics of the U.S. war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis.

Rumsfeld said the Bush administration's critics are suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation's security. His remarks were his most pointed defenses of President Bush's war policies and among his toughest attacks on critics.

Speaking to several thousand veterans at the American Legion's national convention, Rumsfeld pointed to the lessons of history, including the failure to confront Hitler in the 1930s.

"I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said. "Can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased? Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America - not the enemy - is the real source of the world's troubles?"

Rumsfeld spoke to the American Legion as part of a coordinated White House strategy, before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and calls to withdraw U.S. troops.

Addressing the same audience later Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the Bush administration is countering extremism with hope and democracy and that history will bear out that strategy.

"If we quit before the job is done, the cost of failure will be severe, indeed immeasurable," Rice said.

"If we abandon the Iraqi people before their government is strong enough to secure the country, we will show reformers across the region that America cannot be trusted to keep its word," she said.

Rumsfeld said it should be obvious to anyone that terrorists must be confronted, not appeased.

"But some seem not to have learned history's lessons," he said, adding that part of the problem is that the American news media have tended to emphasize the negative rather than the positive.

Rumsfeld's remarks drew criticism from Democrats.

"It's a political rant to cover up his incompetence," said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in a statement: "It's interesting to me that they generalize the support for the war. They're not realistic with the fact that there's no progress."

[Last modified August 30, 2006, 00:58:04]