[NYTr] Rummy's Rant on Venezuelan Referendum in WashPost Op-ed
 
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 11:57:13 -0600 (CST)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[Given how well the rest of Rumsfeld's brilliant predictions and
analyses have worked out, this rant bodes well for Chavez. --NY Transfer

The Washington Post - Dec 2, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800_pf.html

Op-Ed:

The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like ChC!vez

By Donald Rumsfeld

Today the people of Venezuela face a constitutional referendum, which,
if passed, could obliterate the few remaining vestiges of Venezuelan
democracy. The world is saying little and doing less as President Hugo
ChC!vez dismantles Venezuela's constitution, silences its independent
media and confiscates private property. ChC!vez's ambitions do not stop
at Venezuela's borders, either. He has repeatedly threatened its
neighbors. In late November, Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe,
declared that ChC!vez's efforts to mediate hostage talks with Marxist
terrorists from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
were not welcome. ChC!vez responded by freezing trade with Colombia.

With diplomatic, economic and communications institutions designed for
a different era, the free world has too few tools to help prevent
Venezuela's once vibrant democracy from receding into dictatorship. But
such a tragedy is not preordained. In fact, we face a moment when swift
decisions by the United States and like-thinking nations could
dramatically help, supporting friends and allies with the courage to
oppose an aspiring dictator with regional ambitions.

The best place to start is with the prompt passage and signing of the
Colombian free trade agreement, which has been languishing in Congress
for months. Swift U.S. ratification of the pact would send an
unequivocal message to the people of Colombia, the opposition in
Venezuela and the wider region that they do not stand alone against
ChC!vez. It would also provide concrete economic opportunities to the
people of Colombia, helping to offset the restrictions being imposed by
Venezuela -- and it would strengthen the U.S. economy in the bargain.

The importance of the Venezuela-Colombia clash goes beyond turmoil in
the U.S. back yard. The episode can help us understand what's at stake
in a new age of globalization and information, an age in which trade
networks can be as powerful as military alliances. Extending freedom
from the political sphere to the economic one and building the global
architecture, such as free trade agreements, to support those
relationships can -- and should -- be a top priority for the United
States in the 21st century.

Since the first years of the Cold War, 10 presidential administrations
have operated within an institutional framework fashioned during the
Truman administration: NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the CIA, the Defense Department, Voice of
America and the National Security Council. Over six decades, the United
States and the rest of the free world have benefited from those
institutions, which led to victory in the Cold War and helped maintain
international order thereafter.

But with the passage of more than half a century, the end of the Cold
War, the attacks of 9/11 and the rise of an Islamic extremist movement
that hopes to use terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to alter
the course of humankind, it has become obvious that the national
security institutions of the industrial age urgently need to be adapted
to meet the challenges of this century and the information age.

At home, the entrenched bureaucracies and diffuse legislative processes
of the U.S. government make it hard to creatively, swiftly and
proactively handle security threats. Turf-conscious subcommittees in
Congress inhibit the country's ability to mobilize government agencies
to tackle new challenges. For example, U.S. efforts to build up the
police and military capacity of partner nations such as Afghanistan,
Iraq and Pakistan to fight al-Qaeda and other extremists have been
thwarted over the past six-plus years by compartmentalized budgets,
outdated restrictions and budget cycles that force a nation at war to
spend three years to develop, approve and execute a program.

The United States has also lost several tools that were central to
winning the Cold War. Notably, U.S. institutions of public diplomacy
and strategic communications -- both critical to the current struggle
of ideas against Islamic radicalism -- no longer exist. Some believed
that after the fall of the Soviet Union such mechanisms were no longer
needed and could even threaten the free flow of information. But when
the U.S. Information Agency became part of the State Department in
1999, the country lost what had been a valuable institution capable of
communicating America's message to international audiences powerfully
and repeatedly.

Meanwhile, a new generation of foes has mastered the tools of the
information age -- chat rooms, blogs, cellphones, social-networking Web
sites -- and exploits them to spread propaganda, even while the U.S.
government remains poorly organized and equipped to counter with the
truth in a timely manner. The nation needs a 21st-century "U.S. Agency
for Global Communications" to inform, to educate and to compete in the
struggle of ideas -- and to keep its enemies from capitalizing on the
pervasive myths that stoke anti-Americanism.

Many existing international institutions are also falling short. The
United Nations -- which elected Syria and Iran to a commission on
disarmament, Sudan to one on human rights and Zimbabwe to one on
sustainable development -- can hardly be considered a credible arbiter
of international issues and dialogue. Endemic inertia and corruption
threaten to render the United Nations even less effective in the 21st
century.

NATO, the great bulwark against communist expansion, could be usefully
reoriented toward today's threats to the nation-state system -- global
problems that can be successfully dealt with only by broad coalitions
of nations capable of efficiently executing collective decisions. By
building bilateral and regional partnerships with other like-thinking
countries -- such as India, Singapore, Australia, Japan, South Korea
and Israel -- NATO could evolve into a diplomatic and military
instrument of the world's democratic and capitalist societies.

We also must reinvigorate the structures that support global
prosperity. Free trade seems to be slipping out of fashion in Congress
and the presidential campaign, with some candidates calling for a
"timeout" for free trade and the abolition of current agreements, such
as NAFTA and CAFTA. But the world will need a network of trading
nations to provide a way to change the circumstances of people in poor
nations. Strong U.S. economic relations with the countries of Latin
America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East would encourage international
development and investment even as they build closer ties among the
United States and its allies. The prosperity that trade pacts foster
has proved to be one of the most effective weapons against internal
instability and international aggression.

Today's global order is threatened not only by violent extremists,
rogue regimes, failing states and aspiring despots such as ChC!vez. It
is also threatened by the complacent assumption that our domestic and
global institutions, in their present form, can meet these growing
menaces.

In the first years of the Cold War, the free world's leaders created
the new institutions necessary to prevail against communism. Sixty
years later, six years into a new ideological struggle, in the face of
new challenges from asymmetric warfare, in an age in which information
mixes with weapons of unprecedented lethality, these old institutions
by and large remain arrayed to deal with the enemies of the last
struggle, not the enemies of today.

Pundits tend to focus on individuals, not institutions. Personalities,
after all, garner more headlines than do bureaucracies and agreements.
But when institutions no longer serve our interests well -- or, worse,
hamper important efforts -- we need to hear more about reform through
public commentary, in Congress and on the campaign trail. The next
president will face the issue of reforming domestic and international
institutions -- and will need to accelerate the efforts begun by
President Bush. We can prevail by mustering the same resolve that
President Harry S. Truman and others demonstrated 60 years ago.

Donald Rumsfeld is a former secretary of defense.

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