Memo to Rummy: Quit challenging them by saying that our god is bigger than their god might be a step in the right direction. <g>
Posted on Mon, Nov. 03, 2003
Rumsfeld targets seeds that spawn terror
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday that the world must start thinking about how to reduce the number of people who are becoming terrorists through teachings in radical Islamic schools and not just focus on killing or capturing them after they commit violent acts.
In three TV appearances Sunday, Rumsfeld expanded on his Oct. 16 internal memo in which he posed the question, "Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?"
"We are capturing and killing a lot of terrorists," Rumsfeld said on "Fox News Sunday," "but we also have to think about the number of new ones that are being created." One problem, he said, was lack of knowledge about how many anti-American terrorists are being turned out.
"There is no way to measure it because you don't know what's happening in each one of these radical cleric schools ... how many people are coming out of these radical madrassa schools," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Saying the United States is not organized yet to handle the problem, Rumsfeld said, "We need to find ways to make sure we're winning the battle of ideas and that we're reducing the number of terrorists ... that are being taught to go out and murder and kill innocent men, women and children."
Asked for the solution, Rumsfeld noted that with the dissolution of the United States Information Agency and its merger into the State Department, the country is "not organized, trained or equipped" to fight a war of ideas overseas. "What has to change in our country, organizationally, overt, covert, either one, so that we can have a higher confidence that we're reducing the number of people who (become terrorists)? " he asked.
Rumsfeld pointed out that the administration had created a Department of Homeland Security and beefed up the Pentagon's special forces units to meet the new world of terrorism, but had not addressed "reducing the number of people who are being attracted into the terrorist business."
Saying the solution was outside the Defense Department and even U.S. hands, he said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "The world needs to think about other things we can do to reduce the number of schools that teach terrorism."
While Rumsfeld focused solely on radical Islamic madrassas as the breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists, he failed to include such things as the actions of U.S. troops in Iraq or their presence in other Muslim countries, which were recently used in a message by Osama bin Laden designed to recruit new terrorists.
In a tape played over the Al-Jazeera TV network Oct. 18, bin Laden warned Iraqis not to cooperate with U.S. forces and urged young people in neighboring Arab countries to join a jihad, or holy war, against the Americans. Whether in response to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq or the urgings of bin Laden, the number of foreign terrorists entering Iraq has grown despite the increase of Iraqi border patrol forces.
"We've scooped up 200 to 300 foreign fighters who have come into (Iraq) from a whole host of countries, . . . 20 to 30 different countries," Rumsfeld said. |
