DEFENDING THE DoD
WILLIAM KRISTOL's "Huffing and Puffing" (Oct. 23) manipulates Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's comments at a recent press conference and misleads your readers. Kristol quotes at length from the October 11 press conference during which the secretary opened his remarks by noting the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole. The secretary then moved into a discussion of the threat posed by North Korea.
Kristol interrupts Secretary Rumsfeld's remarks by interjecting a question, asking, "But on the sixth anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole, what are we doing about these threats and trends?" He then proceeds to use the rest of the secretary's remarks--in which Mr. Rumsfeld discusses the need for the cooperation of the international community on stopping North Korea--to answer a question the secretary was never asked.
Kristol conducts this misleading parsing of Secretary Rumsfeld's statement so that he can make his point that, in his words, "the lesson Rumsfeld takes from the USS Cole, and all that happened since, is this: "We're dependent on the 'international community' and we need to cooperate with others" (emphasis added).
Though it may strike some as odd that Kristol takes issue with the notion of the "need to cooperate with others," Secretary Rumsfeld said nothing of the sort. His discussion of the international community pertained specifically to the president's policy on North Korea, not our reaction to the Cole bombing or other terrorist attacks. If anything, in fact, the secretary's comments on the international community could be read as exactly the opposite of what Kristol implies. Indeed, a few days earlier, the secretary noted at another press event that "the international community's going to have to do a lot better or else face a world that will be quite different, with multiple nuclear nations and . . . the added risk of these very lethal weapons falling into the hands of nonstate entities."
A full transcript of the secretary's comments in both press conferences--absent Kristol's commentary--is available at www.defenselink.mil/transcripts.
DORRANCE SMITH Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Public Affairs
Washington, D.C.
EX-PAGE SPEAKS FRANKLY
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER adeptly articulates the absurdity of the Mark Foley scandal ("Sex Scandals and Double Standards," Oct. 16) by demonstrating the double standards that plague the House of Representatives. As a former congressional page (class of '89), I had to endure the Barney Frank scandal. My page class also had the wonderful opportunity of listening to Rep. Frank speak at our graduation. But instead of the typical graduation speech, we were privileged to listen to his justification of why his male prostitution ring was acceptable to him and to other Democratic members of Congress. That's certainly one speech I will never forget.
LARA STEAD BARRERA
Warrenton, Va.
CORRECTION
ALGIS VALIUNAS suggests in "A Russian Master" (Sept. 25) that W.W. Norton & Co. has provided the "first-ever English edition of Chekhov's Complete Plays," but in the late 1990s Smith and Kraus published Chekhov's complete dramatic works, translated by Carol Rocamora in three volumes.