Rumsfeld: ‘No Question’ US Losing War on Terror

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said “there is no question but that we’re losing” the war on terror in an interview set to broadcast on Friday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“I can’t justify my comment numerically, but there is no question but that we’re losing. And the reason we’re losing is because of the lack of leadership. That’s the only reason. We have stepped back” he declared.

He continued “Defense investment in the United States has gone from 10% of GDP a year under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and today, it’s less than 4%. And they’ve sequestered, have a sequestration that tells the world that the United States’ economic situation, or attitudinally, is unwilling to make the kinds of investments that Eisenhower would talk about as peace through strength, where we — would be unambiguously a deterrent, a dissuasion just by our existence, and not by our actions, but by our, the very fact of that capability.” And “we’re telling Putin, in effect, that well, we don’t like what he’s doing in Ukraine, but oh, golly, we’ll try to figure out a way that maybe he won’t do that. Europe is so dependent on Russian energy and oil that they are really pretty much out of the game at the present time with respect to Ukraine. And Ukraine’s enormously important. Well, if you do what you’re doing on your economy, you do what you’re doing with respect to terrorism and ISIS and being ineffective, and then you do what you’re doing with respect to Ukraine, well, I think the world is going to say gee, we could do pretty much what we would want in the Baltics, for example, or in Central Asia, or in the Spratly Islands, where the Chinese might want to increase the level of pressure there against their neighbors.”

Rumsfeld was also asked about comments made by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani about President Obama’s love of America, Rumsfeld “I can’t say whether somebody loves something or doesn’t love something.” He then added, “but clearly, his behavior is that he feels that the United States has in the past, and is today –behaves in a way that is unhelpful. And he blames us, our country, for some of the circumstances in the world that are adverse to the world’s interest. Now if one wants to characterize that as not loving the country, I don’t know. I wouldn’t, myself, but I would say that he clearly, when he goes out and makes an apology tour, and when he has the press conferences he has, and says what he says, [that] we should get off our high horse, and he pretends that these are random acts, and he calls the Fort Hood a workplace violence, he’s clearly in a state of serious denial. I mean, he can’t be, if anyone in the world looking at what’s going on knows that the way he is describing it is not accurate.”

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