SNOWBALL

[banana republican]

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040207-0432.html

Secretary Rumsfeld Availability at the Munich Conference on Security Policy

<snip>
If someone is going to throw a snowball at you, you may not want to act preemptively; you can afford to take the blow and live with it and do something after the fact. As you go up the scale from a snowball to a weapon of mass destruction, at some point, where the risk gets high enough that it is not going to be a snowball in your face, but it could be a biological weapon that could kill tens of thousands of human beings; and then you ask yourself, do you have an obligation to take the blow and then do something about it afterwards? Or if you’ve got at risk, not 3,000, but 30,000, or 300,000 -- whatever -- or do you have an obligation in that case to act somewhat differently? And it seems to me that when one is looking at the idea of preempting -- I mean think back in history. If one is looking across a border and they see the enemy massing on the other side of the border, people tended not to wait until the enemy came in and attacked the country; they tended to go after the massing forces before they came in to your country. So preemption is not something that is new, and it is something in my mind that has to be weighed and considered by all of us with respect to what is the potential loss.

<snip>

Q: No. I have no gun in my pocket! But I want to ask a question about guns in pockets. My question follows on the question posed here by Senator Graham, and it has to do with preemption and intelligence. I agree with you that you can’t wait to absorb the first blow when the other side isn’t throwing snowballs but something much heftier. But it follows therefrom that we have to have very, very good intelligence. I’ve got to make sure before I train my M-16 on the other guy that what he has in his pocket is actually a gun and he is not fondling his pipe. Now the problem -- and this is not just a problem of the United States, it’s a problem of the intelligence services in Britain, in Germany, even in Israel, which has a great local advantage -- that they all did not produce, say, extremely good intelligence on Iraq. And the question now is, it’s in no way the same question that Senator Graham poses. What are we going to about intelligence in a situation where first-rate intelligence is absolutely vital, so we don’t shoot he wrong guy? Let’s start with the CIA and NSA.



Rumsfeld: That is a critically important question. If you are going to live in this world, and it’s a dangerous world, you do have to have elegant intelligence, and it is tough. When you’re dealing with closed societies, where we don’t know what we need to know, and they now precisely what it is they want to hide from us, and they’re good at it, and people are proliferating not just weapons, they’re proliferating techniques to deal with denial and deception, to avoid being found as to what you’re doing. The tunneling that’s taking place on this globe makes life complicated. Fiberoptics makes life complicated, cuts in intelligence budgets makes life more complicated. The complexity of the fact that we now don’t have one target, we’ve got multiple targets that we have to be thinking about and looking at. It is a very difficult thing to do.