Rumsfeld: Obama Foolish to Avoid Using Term 'Terrorism'

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says that if the Obama administration insists on avoiding the word "terrorism" in regard to acts of violence by radicals, "we are fooling only ourselves."

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, Rumsfeld — who headed the Defense Department under Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush — was asked why the Obama administration is so reluctant to mention the word terrorism, even in regard to the Benghazi attack and the Boston bombings.

"There are probably two reasons," he responds.

"One is that even in the prior administration, the Bush administration, there was a concern about being seen as being against a religion. But the problem is there is an enemy, they are raising money, they are training people to kill innocent men, women, and children, and unless we are willing to say that, if we pretend that what happened at Ft. Hood was workplace violence as opposed to a terrorist act by a radical, then we are fooling only ourselves.

"The second reason that they're reluctant to talk about it is because President Obama went around saying that al-Qaida's on the run. We killed most of their leadership and basically the problem's going to go away.

"It hasn’t gone away. It is still there. And it's not going to go away in one year or four years. We're going to have to compete ideologically against the ideas, just as we had to compete against the ideas of communism."

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In fighting terrorism, Rumsfeld adds, "the first thing you have to do is identify what the enemy is and what it is you're against and why you're against it. The terrorists' goal is to eliminate the idea of a nation-state. The world is ordered and organized on nation-states, but they're against that and they want to break that down.

"If we're going to resist that, we can't abandon the ideological arguments and the ideological space that exists. If we had said, well, communism is just another way of having a government instead of a brutal, repressive, unworkable system that deserves, as President Reagan said, to be in the ash heap of history, we would never have prevailed against communism."

Editor's Note: Read the full Newsmax interview with Donald Rumsfeld,
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