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In the days following 9/11, I found myself searching for a perspective, some historical parallel to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the planned attack on the White House. I felt I needed a context which would allow me to understand how the world was different. News media and our government likened it to Pearl Harbor. But the following recent email brought to mind another parallel.
JIM LEHRER: Before 9/11, you talked much about reforming the military, changing the way things work, changing the culture. Does this budget reflect any of that?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, indeed, it does. The 2003 budget, which was part of the President's budget announced today, has a great deal of transformation in it. There's some who define transformation one way, would say that there's some $20 billion worth of transformational activities; another way of defining it would say $50 billion. I think it's almost inappropriate to look at dollars. I think that - that transformation is not an event; it is a process. It is something that involves a mind set, an attitude, a culture. It is something that, for example, might not even involve a new weapons system. It might just be the connectivity among existing weapons systems. It might be a different way of organizing or fighting, as we found in Afghanistan. So I think the transformation - the word - needs to think about it and understand that it's more of a process than an event.
JIM LEHRER: But if somebody were to look at this budget - forget the money for a while - just look at what it buys, does it buy anything that different than what we already have?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I think when you say "that different," it's important to understand that you can - when the Germans transformed their armed forces into the Blitzkrieg, they transformed only about 5 or 10 percent of their force. Everything else was the same, but they transformed the way they used it, the connectivity between aircraft and forces on the ground, the concentration of it in a specific portion of the line, and it - one would not want to transform 100 percent of your forces. You only need to transform a portion. The Office of Homeland Security will initially be run by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. It should be noted that Ridge himself got in trouble a few years ago for praising the efficiency of the Third Reich's civilian administration. Ridge also spoke highly of Mussolini's ability to keep the Italian trains running on time. Now Ridge will be the guy running the Office of Homeland Security.
So I was put in mind of this parallel:
In November 1932, after a closely contested election, the Nazi Party failed to win a decisive majority in the parliament. On February 27, 1933 the German Reichstag was set afire (possibly) by a Dutch Communist. On the next day, the government enacted a decree "for the Protection of the People and the State," which dispensed with all constitutional protections of personal rights. The "Enabling Act" was passed on March 23, at which point the other parties in the parliament lined up in support of the Nazis. Of course this parallel to 9/11 does not hold in terms of the act itself, but I wonder if it is not a fairly accurate one in terms of how it has been used.
Steve W., high school teacher, Manhattan, N.Y.
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