Jonathan Kay

National Post

November 15, 2001

The course of modern U.S. history is punctuated by great speeches. They come about once per generation. In 1941, as the United States entered World War II, FDR spoke of "a date which will live in infamy." In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. told his supporters "I have a dream." And in 1982, during the Cold War, Ronald Reagan gave his legendary "Evil Empire" speech to the British House of Commons.

"I always felt there was one major turning point that led inexorably to the winning of the Cold War," writes Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in his new autobiography, In the Arena: A Memoir Of The 20th Century. "And that was when President Reagan, in perhaps his most major violation of the conventional wisdom, blatantly told the world that Communism was an Evil Empire. With this, he ended the years of national indecision about the nature of Communism. With that single stroke, we gave up 'containment,' 'détente,' 'moral equivalence,' and the idea that Communism and freedom were simply two different but compatible systems."

What speech will define our own era, one in which - to borrow a metaphor from former CIA director James Woolsey - the Cold War dragon has been replaced by a jungle full of poisonous snakes? A likely candidate is the masterful address U.S. President George W. Bush delivered to Congress on Sept. 20. At the time, no one could be certain whether the speech was merely a stirring piece of oratory or a principled blueprint for the eradication of terrorism. The sight of Taliban troops and supporters fleeing Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad under the shadow of U.S. warplanes gives us our answer.

In fact, Mr. Bush’s speech is similar to the one Mr. Reagan delivered two decades ago. Both presidents unabashedly denounced the enemies of freedom as "evil," and described them as heirs to stillborn ideologies. Reagan: "The march of freedom and democracy ... will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." Bush: Militant Islam "will follow the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism ... all the way to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

"I think the parallel between the two [speeches] is strong," Mr. Weinberger told me when I met him in Toronto on Wednesday. "President Reagan believed freedom, democracy and the rule of law should not be compromised. [Militant Islam], like Soviet [Communism], is totally incompatible with all of these things."

As for the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Weinberger, who served as President Reagan's Secretary of Defense from 1981-87 and now serves as Chairman of Forbes Magazine, is a strong supporter. Though he is not affiliated with the current administration in an official capacity, he maintains close friendships with many administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"I've written a column for Forbes - I'll probably have to revise it given how quickly things have moved - that argues against the war's critics," he tells me. "At the beginning, the administration was divided. A number of people felt we shouldn't help the Northern Alliance because they were basically not-nice people. The problem is that nobody in Afghanistan is nice. There's only one organization fighting the Taliban [on the ground], and that's the Northern Alliance. It's true they have done some unpleasant things in the past, and that Pakistan hates them. But in the end, you've got no choice."

"When we made the decision [to support the Northern Alliance] in late October," he adds, "our bombing became a lot more focussed - directly in the Alliance's line of advance. Soon after we did that, the Taliban lost Mazar-e-Sharif."

Regarding Washington's expressed wish that the Northern Alliance stop on the outskirts of Kabul without actually entering the city, Mr. Weinberger dismisses it as a pipe dream. "I was in the infantry and when an infantry unit breaks the front lines and approaches an objective, there's no way you can stop them," he says. "It's like holding up your hand to stop a flooding river."

Mr. Weinberger's recipe for a future Afghanistan government: a broad-based coalition that includes representatives from all the nation's major tribes and political factions - with one exception: The Taliban.

"For a while there was some talk about working with so-called 'moderate' elements within the Taliban," he tells me. "That rather horrified me. It reminded me of what I used to hear from [former National Security Advisor, Robert] McFarlane about Iran. I always made the point that all the moderate elements in Iran were murdered. There were none left. Likewise, I don't think there are any moderate elements in the Taliban."

But the war against terrorism doesn't stop with the Taliban and al Qaeda, Mr. Weinberger says. "You're not going to live in peace until Saddam [Hussein] is gone," he tells me. "I frankly wish that we had done that at the end of the Gulf War - that we had put him in jail next to [former Panamanian president Manuel] Noriega and maybe put him on trial. What we did wrong was to let him stay in power and trust him to co-operate [with weapons inspectors]."

"The proper way to end a war, is what we did after World War II," he adds. "The people who were responsible for starting it were rooted out. Governments were changed completely. When you defeat an enemy, you can't leave the people who caused the war in power."

Jonathan Kay is Editorials Editor

jkay@nationalpost.com