[Marxism] For your amusement: Donald Rumsfeld on "The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chavez"

[Eli Stephens]

Tomorrow's Washington Post:
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800_pf.html

The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez

By Donald Rumsfeld
Sunday, December 2, 2007; B03

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 Chávez dismantles 
Venezuela's constitution, silences its independent media and confiscates private 
property. Chávez'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 Chávez's efforts to mediate hostage talks with 
Marxist terrorists from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, 
were not welcome. Chávez 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 Chávez. 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 Chávez. 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.


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