Donald Rumsfeld Quotes


Each time a foe is defeated in one corner of the world, another appears elsewhere.


Context

Some refer to this as the “Whack-A-Mole” phenomenon, named after the game.


Citations

Donald Rumsfeld, U. S. Secretary of Defense (Republican), U. S. Congressman (Republican, IL), White House Chief of Staff, Commencement Address, U. S. Naval Academy, May 23, 2003

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

America, England, Germany and France Many Japanese leaders predicted war between the Great Powers while America and its European Allies did not see the danger as clearly. Shortly after 1936, Hitler began the Second World War. Japan was indeed prepared. Hiranuma became one of the Japanese extremists and after WWII was convicted of war crimes and given a life sentence.


This was written when the United States was not a dominant military power. At the beginning of the 20th century, the U. S. had the same size military as Argentina. It was France, German, Turkey and England who had the military superiority and it was they who tended to find excuses for war. After WWII, the U. S. was dominant and was involved with a number of wars and military incursions, often with nations that had not attacked the U.S. Korns’ principle was most dramatic when the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq on the excuse that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destructions and then might attack the United States. After the successful invasion, the excuse was shown to be hollow as there were no signs of sophisticated weapons development.


One difficulty of diplomacy with many Islamic leaders is that the culture produces very aggressive rhetoric and very aggressive actions like Islamic terrorism. This quotation is often cited to demonstrate that it is the Iranians that had decided that America is it’s enemy; that America is to be humbled; and that their weapons development are targeted at America. This along with the most frequent Iranian slogan, “Death to America,” for many argues for preemptive military action or maintenance of a high state of readiness. Given statements like this from the leading soldier of the theocracy, there is little doubt that Iranian nuclear weapons would be a great danger to America. Therefore when Iran complains that America did not object to the fact that other nations have the nuclear bomb, they do not take their own rhetoric into account. No other nation with possible nuclear capability has made America its major military adversity and claims as an objective to humble the United States.


Later, he felt that the offense had become almost invincible. See {626741}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.


Trieste was occupied by the British and Americans theoretically, but Tito’s Yugoslavian troops had done most of the WWII fighting and dying in the area and wanted control for the Russian Allies of which Tito was then one. There were frequent armed standoff’s of Anglo Americans and Yugoslav troops that could easily have evolved to full scale fighting. Nine months later, Tito broke with Stalin. An interesting historical fact is that Richard M. Nixon was one of the Congressional Delegation then visiting Trieste.


Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld
  • Born: July 9, 1932
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Politician

Donald Henry Rumsfeld is a retired American politician. Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford, and again from January 2001 to December 2006 under George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the second-oldest person to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1963–69), director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–70), counsellor to the president (1969–73), the United States Permanent Representative to NATO (1973–74), and White House Chief of Staff (1974–75). Between his terms as Secretary of Defense, he served as the CEO and chairman of several companies.