(2 of 5)
A. The situations are not analogous, except in one sense: the consequences of military action are unpredictable. I learned this as Secretary time after time after time: we did certain things we thought would lead to certain results, and the results were different. The Soviets have learned the same thing. Nobody predicted at any particular point in the 1960s the evolution of events in Vietnam. And I think what Powell and Schwarzkopf and the Marine generals have said here, and said very responsibly, is "We can predict the outcome but not the blood costs, particularly; we know we can win, but we can't predict how long it will take; and we cannot predict the political relationships in the area after military action." There may be a power vacuum, there may be Arab against Arab, Arab against the U.S. Who knows?
Q. What does the end of the cold war allow us to do?
A. We have a tremendous opportunity now to develop a vision that is free of the psychological constraints we have operated under for most of my adult life because of the threat of communist aggression. We can stand back and look at ourselves, look at our society. And, my God, we need it! If you look at what's happening in the country you could cry. It's the children. It's just awful what's going on. And something can be done. To say we don't have the resources is nonsense.
There were real threats in the cold war, risks that some governments in Western Europe would be subverted or otherwise end up controlled by the communists. Later we confronted very serious pressures against Berlin and other parts of the world. But I suspect we exaggerated, greatly exaggerated, the strength that lay behind those threats, and therefore I think we probably misused our resources and directed excessive resources toward responding to those threats at considerable cost to our domestic societies.
Q. Are we doing the same thing in the gulf today?
A. No question about it. The cold war occupied not just the efforts of our best minds, but caused our leaders to focus on the Noriegas or the contras or some of these other issues, as opposed to more fundamental problems.
Q. I would add the Ho Chi Minhs. Is that fair?
A. And the Ho Chi Minhs. I agree.
Q. Where else did we exaggerate the threat?
A. To begin with, the nuclear threat. And I'm not just talking about the missile gap. We could have maintained deterrence with a fraction of the number of warheads we built. The cost is tremendous -- not just of warheads. It's research, and it's building all the goddam bombers and missiles. Over the past 20 years the unnecessary costs are in the tens of billions. Insane. It was not necessary. And moreover, our actions stimulated the Russians ultimately.
Q. You spent an hour and a half with Gorbachev a few weeks ago. How did he seem to you?
A. You could see he's going through hell. Our objectives there and Gorbachev's objectives aren't that different. He doesn't want disorder. He sure as hell doesn't want to use military force there. I'm not arguing that military force may not be used; I'm arguing that he doesn't want to use it. What I am fairly confident of is that whatever happens in the Soviet Union, there is not going to be reconstitution of the threat that we felt we faced for 45 years.
Q. What were your worst moments as Secretary of Defense?