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Gates praises Rumsfeld for service to America
Karachi News.Net
Friday 25th June, 2010
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was honored by the military in Washington on Friday.
A special ceremony was held for the former civilian head of the U.S. military at the Pentagon, where a portrait of Mr Rumsfeld was unveiled.
The ceremony was hosted by current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who replaced Rumsfeld after he was removed by then-President George W Bush.
Gates was joined for the occasion by former defense secretaries William Cohen and Frank Carlucci, Retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, retired Marine Gen. Peter Pace, former deputy secretaries Paul Wolfowitz and Gordon England, retired Air Force Gen. Joe Ralston, retired Navy Adm. Vern Clark, retired Navy Adm. Ed Giambastiani, and former senior Pentagon correspondent Charlie Aldinger. Conspicuous by his absence was former Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's long-time friend, and supporter, who was largely responsible for his appointment in 2001.
Rumsfeld will now have two official portraits hanging in the Pentagon. He served as the 13th defense secretary from 1975 to 1977, and as the 21st secretary from 2001 to 2006. In his first stint he was the youngest person to serve in the position. The second time round he was the oldest.
“On a bright Tuesday morning in September, eight months into President [George W.] Bush’s first term, a decade of slumber in a holiday from history came to a crashing halt,” Gates told the gathering. “This country and this military learned how dangerous and unpredictable this new era could be, and saw in the starkest terms how necessary was the task of transforming this department to meet these challenges.”
Rumsfeld inspired, educated and often charmed a wounded nation, the secretary said. Rumsfeld’s first action on 9/11 was to rush to the aid of those killed and wounded in the attack. In the days and months after the attack, Americans heard straight talk from the podium about how the military really was going to “kill” America’s enemies – “jarring stuff for a country grown accustomed to euphemisms and political correctness,” Gates said.
And the world saw the rapid removal of two odious regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said.
In addition to fighting America’s enemies, Rumsfeld “simultaneously and doggedly pursued an agenda of institutional transformation and reform – grappling with inertia and vested interests like the champion wrestler he once was,” Gates said. “The result is an American military that has become more agile, lethal, and prepared to deal with the full spectrum of conflict.”
Rumsfeld famously brought his own unique and bracing style of personal management to the Pentagon bureaucracy, Gates noted, citing Rumsfeld’s habit of sending handwritten memos to his aides, who called them “snowflakes.”
Military and civilian employees “soon discovered that snowflakes really could fall from above in the middle of August,” Gates said. “Self-described as ‘genetically impatient,’ [Rumsfeld] did not brook much nonsense or suffer fools gladly, as many an unprepared briefer would find out the hard way.”
Rumsfeld, who will be 78 next week, joked that he has been alive for almost a third of the existence of the republic.
“I’ve seen our country in times of depression, prosperity, peace and turmoil, exhilarating triumphs and agonizing wars,” he said. “In my lifetime, our national leaders have had to tackle the worst economic depression, order troops into combat against the longest of odds on islands in the Pacific and battlefields in Europe, win legislative struggles that belatedly but finally brought equality to millions of Americans, right our battered ship of state after the Vietnam War and Watergate and win a 50-year struggle against a communist empire of boundless ambition an ideology of discredited lies."
“And we’ve seen this great nation take the offense after a devastating terrorist attack, one that shook the foundation of this building now almost nine years ago,” he said.
America has survived all these crises “because we are a free people, blessed with a free economic system, a free political system,” Rumsfeld said. “We’re free to think and to act, to believe and to protest, to vote and petition, and yes, free to succeed, free to fail and free to start again.”
The former defense secretary spoke about his favorite photo that brightly illustrates what freedom can accomplish: it is a satellite photo of the Korean peninsula taken at night. The free South Korea is bathed in light. In the communist North, a small glimmer of light is seen around the capital city of Pyongyang – otherwise the country is dark.
“They are exactly the same people north and south, exactly the same resources north and south, but those millions of Koreans who labor in the north work not for their families, but for a regime that enslaves them,” the former defense secretary said.
The United States is free and the people of America are free to make their own choices, he pointed out.
“We can choose to engage the world and strengthen alliances with our friends and our trading relations, deter potential foes and to take the fight to them when necessary,” Rumsfeld said. “Or we can retreat and make the tragic mistake of modeling our country after failing systems. If we choose the latter, let there be no doubt, we are certain to fail the generations that follow.”
Rumsfeld said it was important to him and his wife, Joyce, that his second official portrait includes the photo of the Pentagon workers unfurling the American flag.
“It shows that the traits of resilience and perseverance, hile remarkable, re not uncommon in those in this department,” he said. “Those traits are what sustained this country, and what I saw every day in the men and women I served alongside months and years after the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history.”
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