Defense, democracy and the war on terrorism - Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith - Transcript

US Department of Defense Speeches, April 23, 2004

Remarks By Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Black Sea Security Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, Thursday, April 22, 2004.

I want to thank Tad Oelstrom and the Kennedy School for inviting me back to Harvard.

Thirty years ago, I was a student here at the college majoring in Government and concentrating on international relations. Among the hot topics of the day were China-Taiwan, Cyprus, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, international terrorism and that hardy perennial, the Arab-Israeli conflict.

That those topics remain hot demonstrates a degree of regrettable continuity in world affairs. Nonetheless, international relations and the global security picture are drastically different now from what they were then. And no one can appreciate the transformation more acutely or personally than those of you who come from countries formerly within the Soviet empire.

On March 29, 2004, which was an appropriately sunny, warm and promising Spring day in Washington, I attended the White House ceremony at which President Bush welcomed into the NATO alliance our seven new members: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The event received less public attention in the United States than it deserved. It marked a grand achievement in international security affairs. It was a bright moment in the history of human freedom.

That ceremony capped many years of effort. The effort began, not just a few years ago when the new allies formally entered NATO's membership action program, but decades ago, when they were still squarely, and it seemed to many, inescapably, within the Communist bloc.

For some of us, the project to liberate the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from Communist tyranny was a lifetime project.

I deepened my intellectual engagement in that cause as a student here at Harvard and benefited especially from the lectures and books of Professor Richard Pipes, who headed Harvard's Russian Research Center.

We were part of a rather small minority in Cambridge who thought that working to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union was not only a noble pursuit, but a realistic project. Richard Pipes joined the Reagan administration to implement that project and I had the honor and pleasure of working with him on the National Security Council staff before I crossed the Potomac River for my first stint at the Pentagon.

As many of us in the Reagan Administration saw it, the Cold War was fundamentally about protecting the freedom--the lives and civil liberties--of the United States and our allies.

We won the Cold War while avoiding World War III, a rather amazing strategic accomplishment for which the world is a better place. But we find that our lives and civil liberties--our security and freedom--are threatened seriously again--now from other quarters--in particular from al Qaida and its network of fellow terrorist groups and their state and non-state supporters.

As promoting freedom for others was a potent element of our strategy for winning the Cold War, so it serves as an important element in our strategy for winning the war on terrorism today.

Some assume that when US policymakers discuss promoting freedom we mean creating systems of government in other countries that look like the American Constitutional system. But that isn't the case.

The 18th century British political philosopher Edmund Burke gives us some useful guidance in thinking about the championing abroad of freedom and democratic political institutions. Burke wrote at a time when the fervor of the French Revolution was sending tremors through Europe. Burke cautioned against enthusiasm for theory-against the dangers to liberty and human happiness that can arise from political abstractions. He warned that successful political institutions are rooted in tradition and rely on organic connections to the local soil and culture.

These are weighty admonitions. They tell us to respect the importance of the differences between societies long accustomed to democratic practices and other societies. And they highlight for us the magnitude of the task of encouraging democratic development in the latter societies.

Burke's admonitions, however, do not mean that countries without experience of democratic government are doomed forever to remain undemocratic. There are too many examples from the last half-century of successful new democracies in Asia, Latin America and Europe for us to believe that.

Successive US administrations have promoted freedom abroad for a variety of good reasons. Among the principal good reasons for our doing so now is the role that democratic institution-building can play in our strategy for the war on terrorism.

We cannot win this war if all we do is disrupt and attack terrorist networks. Terrorist groups can recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists faster and far more inexpensively than the US and its coalition partners can capture or kill them.

Victory for the coalition will require us to counter ideological support for terrorism--to reduce the flow of new recruits into the terrorists' ranks. This task has at least two parts: First, the de-legitimation of terrorism, making terrorism (as President Bush has put) like the slave trade, piracy on the high seas and genocide, activities that no respectable person can condone, much less support.