Thank you all very much.  It’s a pleasure to be here, and especially to receive the Keeper of the Flame Award in the company of so many good friends.  

I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld.  I don’t mind that a bit.  It fits something of a pattern.  In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first.  But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.  

To Frank Gaffney and all the supporters of Center for Security Policy, I thank you for this honor.  And I thank you for the great energy and high intelligence you bring to as vital a cause as there is – the advance of freedom and the uncompromising defense of the United States.

Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before.  You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors.  You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier.  With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action.  And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.

So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.  

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Note from Erick: Thanks to Liz for sending this on. This is the full transcript of her remarks to the Redstate Gathering, as prepared for delivery.

It is such a pleasure to be here in Atlanta to join you at the first Redstate annual gathering. I wanted to come to thank you personally for everything you do. First, to Erick Erickson, a true trailblazer, who has been making this all possible for many years. And to all of you who make the conservative blogosphere such a vital tool in 21st century politics and policy, it’s an honor to be with you. You all do hugely important work educating the American people, and holding our elected leaders and the mainstream media accountable. We are living at a critical moment in the history of the nation. We need you now more than ever, so I am here to say thank you and to urge you on.

It has become somewhat fashionable today to talk about conservatives and conservatism as a movement in peril. In some quarters, we’re said to be near death. I am here today to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. All across the country, Americans are standing up to be heard at meetings like this, at tea parties, on blogs, at town hall meetings, and we see it in the polls — the message to the Obama Administration is clear — we have grave concerns about the path they’ve put us on.

As we meet today, six months into President Obama’s Administration, we have learned much. We have learned that President Obama will not govern from the center, that he does not believe in American exceptionalism, that he thinks there is a moral equivalence between America and our adversaries, that he wants to expand the federal government until it permeates every corner of this land, and every aspect of your life, that he will raise everyone’s taxes, and that he thinks bureaucrats should choose our doctors, prescribe our medical care, and ration it if need be. At his last press conference, we also learned that he doesn’t have much faith in policemen or pediatricians. This is not change we can believe in. It’s not the change the American people voted for.

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This week the House will vote on a supplemental appropriations bill that provides funding to continue the War on Terror. While I am pleased with what is in the bill, I believe we need to commit more resources to what should be our nation’s number one priority. Failing to do so could prove catastrophic for the United States and our interests abroad.

Recent history has shown us that terrorists test new presidents early in their terms. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing happened in the first year of President Clinton’s first term. 9/11 was carried out within eight months of George W. Bush’s inauguration.

Yet, actions in Washington have the world questioning America’s commitment to security and defense. While I applaud the Obama administration for listening to General Petraeus and shifting our military focus away from our successes in Iraq and to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, I believe we are falling short in other key areas.

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Yesterday we learned that Congress’s most powerful appropriator has decided not to grant President Obama the funds he requested to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo. Today Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey explained why:

“I personally favor what the administration’s talking about doing, but so far as we can tell there is yet no concrete program for that,” Obey said ahead of his panel’s markup of the $94.2 billion supplemental Thursday. “And while I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program.”

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Rasmussen finds 58% of Americans believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos endangers the national security of the United States.

Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

Other findings:

• Americans don’t want an investigation of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. Only 28% think the Obama administration should do any further investigating of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects, 58% are opposed. Democrats are evenly divided over whether further investigation is necessary. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either major party are against more investigating.

• Just 42% of all voters say terrorism suspects were tortured by the United States, unchanged from October 2007. Most Democrats (54%) and a plurality of unaffiliated voters (46%) believe the United States did torture terrorism suspects. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republican voters do not believe torture was used.

No wonder President Obama is now backing away from investigating the Bush Administration.

The Washington Post reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates broke with CIA Director Leon Panetta, and four past CIA Directors from Republican and Democratic administrations, to counsel President Barack Obama to release selected CIA memos describing enhanced interrogation techniques used to extract information from captured terrorists. His reason? It must have been a good one.

Robert M. Gates indicates that he supported the release of sensitive memos on detainee interrogation methods last week because he viewed their ultimate release as inevitable.

Reveal secrets before they are leaked? Interesting philosophy. It leaves just one question, though. Why have any secrets at all?

Let’s see everything Mr. Secretary. Troop movements, battle plans, weapons systems, intelligence assets, names of covert agents, all of it. It’s all bound to be disclosed someday anyhow, right? Might as well just get it out there now. No need to actually protect sensitive national security information. America should just dump all of its secrets out in the open and hope that no damage results. After all, in the age of Obama, hope is the policy and our protection.

The faux outrage over “torture” during the Bush War on Terror (I refer to it as the “Bush” war because, under Obama, we’re apparently replacing the “Global War on Terror” with the “Multiple-Day Standoff on Man-Caused Disasters”) is no more becoming of the left now than it was two, three, or four years ago.

Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.

The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.

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Mort Kondracke - who comments on Fox News and serves as Executive Editor of Roll Call - notes that while Barack Obama gets a wonderful reception abroad, he doesn’t seem to accomplish much:

But it’s not a good sign that NATO allies did not answer [Obama's] call for more troops for Afghanistan. They will provide 5,000 trainers, but no more combat forces.

Nor did Europeans — especially Merkel and Sarkozy — go along with Obama’s request to pump up economic stimulus to fight the global recession.

The G-20 summit did agree to an increase in funding for the International Monetary Fund to help emerging economies, including Eastern Europe, but that was not a contested issue. In fact, it relieved the European Union from the burden.

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They told me that if I voted for McCain, political appointees would ruthlessly strong-arm career government employees, and force them to stay silent when their views deviated from the company line. And they were right!

[Gates] said he tried to give the services the “maximum possible opportunity” to share their views during the internal budget negotiations.

“The thing that is important is to reinforce within the building, in terms of dealing with the Hill, that there is a chain of command,” he said. “Once the decision is made, and particularly once the president signs off on the budget, then there needs to be discipline about people not conducting guerilla warfare against decisions the president has made.”

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President Obama and defense secretary Gates are still determining whether to end production, 183 planes in, of the F-22 Raptor, the world’s most advanced Air Superiority fighter. The rationale of those who are advocating cutting off the program is as simple as it is misguided: a belief that “the fighter, conceived in the Cold War, is a vastly expensive and over-capable weapon irrelevant to current threats.”

As several observers have pointed out in recent years, the global threats America faces now and is likely to face in the future demand that we do not declare ourselves technologically advanced and capable “enough,” and proceed to rest on our laurels until an opponent engages us in another Cold War-type development-for-development tech and arms race.

For evidence that resting on our laurels on national defense is the last thing we should be doing, we need look no further than the recent actions of our old Cold War adversary, which, in an effort to make itself internationally relevant again (and to take advantage of a president who has sent, in his first two months in office, the strong signal that he is hopelessly in over his head on policy, both domestic and foreign), is replicating its 1980s efforts to expand both influence and footholds into the Western hemisphere.

Back then, a strong president rebuffed the Soviet Union’s attempted advances into the American half of the world (and, ultimately, drove the USSR to destruction). Now, though, we appear to lack the strong, principled, intelligent leadership that we had during the 1980s — a fact that makes it all the more important that we have the best tools of national defense available.

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“Bush probably would have given a very similar speech.”

Do read the whole thing, of course, but that line was worth highlighting. As is the following:

At the risk of heading into la-la land, I think Obama should have tipped his hat ever so slightly today to President Bush, Sen. McCain, and other Republicans who had supported the surge strategy, naming them and thanking them. Of course, there’s no telling how Iraq would look today had the surge never happened, but it’s likely that conditions would be pretty grim and that this withdrawal plan would have the smell of defeat to it, rather than the opposite, as it does.

Obama could have caveated this to death — “I opposed Bush’s decision to begin this war, I opposed how he sold it to America, I opposed the way he prosecuted it,” etc. But he could have recognized that Bush’s decision to change strategies in 2007 is in large part why the security situation in Iraq has turned around more than anyone could have hoped, why we can now begin drawing down our forces with a good measure of confidence, and why our troops now feel more and more that their sacrifice is worth it.

Not only would this have been magnanimous, it would have been smart politics. It would have acknowledged the bipartisanship that underlies the decision to begin bringing our troops home by drawing an important line of continuity through our Iraq efforts of the past two years. It would have disarmed Obama’s more hawkish critics on Iraq by conceding their point on the surge and turning it into an argument for the drawdown, which it is. And it would have shown Republicans that Obama is committed not just to a bipartisanship of style but of substance — not just being willing to recognize when the other side has valid points, but actually incorporating them into one’s own thinking.

The President should have taken Brose’s advice. He would have found much to praise in the Bush Administration’s implementation of the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy. On this issue, see also my contribution to the Arena.

This is the kind of thing one uses one’s inside voice to comment about. And if one has to speak up about it, one speaks up about it privately.

Pardon my snark, but if Leon Panetta were more versed in national security and intelligence matters–instead of merely being parachuted into a national security/intelligence position–he might have known this. And while I had hoped that his experience as White House Chief of Staff during the Clinton Administration would have been helpful in navigating these policy thickets, it would appear otherwise.

Besides pledging not to interfere in the CIA’s day-to-day intelligence operations, [new Director of Central Intelligence Leon] Panetta said he would keep on Deputy Director Steven Kappes and three other top officials at the spy agency. He also said he would encourage differing opinions within the agency and would brief the full House and Senate intelligence committees as much as possible, not just their top members.

–Source. (Emphasis mine.) What good is a DCI who does not get involved in intelligence operations?

Linky, link link:

Reporting from Washington — Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, President Obama’s choice to represent his administration before the Supreme Court, told a key Republican senator Tuesday that she believed the government could hold suspected terrorists without trial as war prisoners.

She echoed comments by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. during his confirmation hearing last month. Both agreed that the United States was at war with Al Qaeda and suggested the law of war allows the government to capture and hold alleged terrorists without charges.

If confirmed as U.S. solicitor general, Kagan, 48, will defend the administration’s legal policy in the courts.

This gives the Obama Administration as much license as the Bush Administration had in setting detainee policy. It is, in fact, no different from the stance that the Bush Administration took. Note as well that in the story, Kagan is recorded as agreeing that we are at war with terrorism–the efforts of other members of the Obama Administration, including the President, to try to retire the “war on terror” rhetoric notwithstanding.

Best to stand clear of the heads of various people on the other side of the partisan divide, as those heads are likely exploding as I type this.

“They told us that if we didn’t vote for Barack Obama, we would bring about a third term for the Bush Administration in which renditions would continue. And they were right!“

Money passage, which should cause netroot heads to explode:

“This is not change. This is definitely more of the same,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers argued against the government in the appeal on Monday.

This is a good inside look at the efforts that were made to bring about the surge of troops and the counterinsurgency effort that helped establish the relative peace that now reigns in Iraq–and has reigned for a while now.

We have yet to hear, of course, from President Obama and Vice President Biden, who both decried and denounced the surge during their respective Presidential campaigns and during the general election. How much more successful do the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy have to be before the President and Vice President finally admit error? And with the admission of error, shouldn’t the White House admit as well that any precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would only serve to put at risk all of the gains that have been made in securing and stabilizing the country?

It’s high time for some mea culpas. We had them concerning the Tom Daschle taxcapades. We ought to have them for a far more important issue the President and the Vice President got wrong.

Link:

President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, Leon E. Panetta, said Friday that he intended to test the claims by current agency officials that coercive interrogation methods were effective in getting terrorism suspects to talk.

Panetta’s comments were the latest indication that the Obama administration may restore some of the CIA’s authority to use interrogation techniques that go beyond those allowed for the U.S. military.

But Panetta emphasized that he would also examine the downside of using coercive methods, and that the agency would operate within the law.

Yup. Pretty equivocal indeed. Hope and Change may have just taken another hit.

[D]eterring our rivals’ base instincts requires strength, fortitude, and a refusal to be bullied by lesser powers. President Obama must marry the “open hand” and the “clenched fist” as deftly as Teddy Roosevelt combined his soft-spokenness with America’s “big stick.” Moreover, we need all the friends we can get, which is why poking at them with “Buy America” restrictions is so misguided.

America’s adversaries appear emboldened. If our country cannot be loved in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, or among the leadership councils of the Taliban, it would certainly help to be feared.

–Dan Twining. Joe Biden was right when he said that Barack Obama would be tested. But how many feel that the President has actually given adequate responses to those testing him?

Does anyone remember the line “the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Barack Obama said this in his inaugural — basically because he didn’t want to come right out and say that he favors big government.

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Just a few weeks ago, current White House press secretary Robert Gibbs promised ‘a one word answer’ when it came to repealing the ban on gays openly serving in the military. Apparently the one word is ‘overpromising’ — which seems to be fast becoming the watchword of the new administration:

The Obama administration is telling the Pentagon and gay-rights advocates that it will have to study the implications for national security and enlist more support in Congress before trying to overturn the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” law and allow gays to serve openly in the military, according to people involved in the discussions.

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