Another Reason Why Donald Rumsfeld Rocks…
All the press about Europeans wishing the US would back away from Bush’s "axis of evil" remarks hasn’t fazed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is sticking to his guns on the "axis of evil" and what it means for US foreign policy.
Let me come back to that Axis of Evil speech. When President Reagan said that the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire, everyone got all a-twitter. All of the elites in the world. They thought, "Oh, my goodness gracious. Isn’t that something. This president of the United States really doesn’t get it, and he doesn’t realise how important it is to have good relationships with Russia" and whoever happened to be the head of that time.
On the other hand, the people of Russia and the Russian republics, I think probably had a very different view of that. The people who’d been in the gulags. The people that weren’t allowed to vote freely, and weren’t allowed to practice their religion freely, and the people of neighbouring countries that were being repressed, and the people on neighbouring continents that felt that the Soviet Union was trying to expand its empire in their direction, they had quite a different view of it.
And that tended not to be carried in the press, or carried in the television of the world. Let’s take North Korea. I’ve got to think of what’s classified and what’s not classified. But let’s just, for the sake of argument, say there are tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of Koreans, political prisoners, in prison camps. Camps, more than a handful of camps, that are the size of cities. That are being starved.
Why are Korean people trying to get out of North Korea into China? It is a regime that is vicious. It’s developing weapons of mass destruction. It is selling them all across the globe.
That’s why Rumsfeld is so good at his job. He knows what the stakes are, and he knows what needs to be done – and he won’t back down from that. The European elites must secretly wish Rumsfeld would go away – he’s done an absolutely brilliant job of shattering their criticisms of the "axis of evil" speech by using their own past hypocricies against them.
