"If We Could Go Back ..."

Sunday, Feb. 5, 2006 10:36 a.m. EST
Donald Rumsfeld Warns Against Islamic 'Empire'

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is warning that Western countries must increase their defense budgets in order to prevent the rise of a "global extremist Islamic empire" that could be as deadly as Hitler's Third Reich.

Speaking at a global security conference in Munich on Saturday, the U.S. defense chief said that Islamic radicals "seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent.

"They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire," he added.

Rumsfeld urged Western leaders not to delude themselves about the growing threat, saying: "We could choose to pretend, as some suggest, that the enemy is not at our doorstep . . . But those who would follow such a course must ask: what if they are wrong? What if at this moment, the enemy is counting on being underestimated, counting on being dismissed, and counting on our preoccupation."

The remarks echoed his comments the day before in an address to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where Rumsfeld warned that radical Islamists "have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."

He cautioned that "that this is not war between the West and the Muslim world" but instead primarily "a struggle between the relatively small fringe groups of extremists -- violent extremists -- who seek to hijack an ancient religion against the overwhelming majority of Muslims."

Still, the U.S. defense chief warned that the rise of Islamofacism could by just as deadly as Nazi Germany and the early decades of the Soviet Union:

"During the 1920s, few people took seriously what some characterized as the mad ravings of a failed painter's book, Mein Kampf," Rumsfeld said. "Similarly, most people earlier ignored the excited utterances of an exiled lawyer -- a so-called rabble rouser -- named Lenin, who had published the pamphlet, 'What is to be Done?'

"But imagine," he posited, "if we could go back today, knowing what we know now about Adolph Hitler and Lenin, to warn the world about those two individuals before they spawned their movements and before literally tens of millions of human beings on this earth were victims -- were killed?"