There's a transcript at <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june02/rumsfeld_2-4.html>.
Doug
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The exchange occurrs at the end. I was listening to this unravel, and I thought, wow, the spin doctors must have been leaping out of their seats, hitting the media phone banks....
JIM LEHRER: You made a speech last week in which you talked about the lessons of the Afghan war. One of them was that you said preemption may be necessary in the future. You said, quote, the best in some cases, the only defense is a good offense. Now that's a major change of US defense policy, is it not? Have we ever taken a preemptory strike against another country without them first attacking us?
DONALD RUMSFELD: We did in Afghanistan. Yes. The answer is. If you think about, we have no choice. A terrorist can attack at any time at any place using a range of techniques. It is physically impossible to defend at every time in every location against every conceivable technique of terrorism. Therefore, if your goal is to stop it, you cannot stop it by defense. You can only stop it by taking the battle to the terrorists, where they are and going after them. Now, you can tolerate it if they're not going to have access to powerful weapons and not going to kill thousands of people. If it's one or two or three people, the world has learned to live with a level of carnage that's modest. You don't like it.
But when it's not modest, when it's large numbers, when it's something like smallpox or anthrax or a chemical weapon or the radiation weapon or killing thousands of people at the World Trade, then you say to yourself, well, if we can't stop terrorists at every location of every technique at every moment of the day or night, what must we do -- Just sit here and take the blows like the World Trade, take the blows that biological weapons would pose to us? The answer is no. You have a responsibility to defend your country. Everyone in the world knows-- even the UN Charter provides-- for the right of self-defense. And the only self-defense, the only effective way to defend is to take the battle to where the terrorists are. They are planning, they are plotting, they have trained thousands of terrorists very well, and we have no choice but to find those people and root them out, as the president said, and stop them from doing what they're doing and stop countries from harboring them.
JIM LEHRER: But we only did this after we were attacked which is the traditional... I'm just saying just as a matter of history the United States has always been attacked and then react. You're saying no more, not... this is a different kind of warfare.
DONALD RUMSFELD: We were attacked. So it is self-defense to go out.
JIM LEHRER: But you're saying that now we're not going to sit back and wait for another World Trade Center, we're now doing that. (Lehrer doesn't notice he has just trapped Rumsfeld, but Rumsfeld feels it at this point.)
DONALD RUMSFELD: We've already been attacked so what we're doing is in self-defense.
JIM LEHRER: Well, but we haven't been attacked by North Korea. We haven't been attacked by Iran; we haven't been attacked by Iraq. You can have a whole list of other countries. But you're saying... I'm just trying to understand how you define a preemption under your definition of the lessons of Afghanistan.
(Lehrer has slipped into actual news reporter mode at this point and has just started to realized it---I think)
DONALD RUMSFELD: It is what we are doing. We identified the reality of al-Qaida in all of these countries and the reality of Taliban harboring them. We said that we have no choice but to defend ourselves, and the only way to do that is to go find them. We have gone in to Afghanistan and we are working the problem very hard. We are also working the problem elsewhere in the world: Where they hide and where they operate and where they train and where they find haven from other countries. And the president has said if you're harboring a terrorist, you're supporting the terrorist. That means that the countries that engage in terrorist act and harbor terrorist and provide haven for terrorist and run the risk of transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, that they pose a danger to the world.
JIM LEHRER: And we may not wait we will not wait for you to strike us before we strike you? (Somewhat recovered, at this point)
DONALD RUMSFELD: Certainly self-defense suggests that if we had reason to believe that that nexus was being bridged or that al-Qaida and terrorists were being provided haven, clearly we have an obligation to try to find them.
(Thinking he is slipping out of the answer, but he isn't. He is making it worse. I think this is where they are looking at each, rather blankly, probably thinking, oops.)
JIM LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Thank you.
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It doesn't look like much in print, but it had a somewhat weird feel to it on tape. So, the best defense is the pre-emptive offense, huh?
Chuck Grimes