INDEPENDENCE, MO. ? Even with recent sectarian violence pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday said citizens there are safer than they were before the American-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power.

“Saddam Hussein had hundreds of thousands of people put into mass graves – hundreds of thousands,” Rumsfeld said during a question-and-answer session at the Truman Presidential Museum & Library. “The idea that there’s violence today : isn’t even comparable.”

The bombings and retaliations that have killed hundreds of Iraqis in recent weeks aren’t cause for the U.S. to take a stronger hand there, Rumsfeld said. He likened the U.S-Iraqi relationship to a father teaching a child to ride a bicycle.

“You know if you don’t let go, you end up with a 40-year-old who can’t ride a bike,” Rumsfeld said.

He spoke in the hometown of President Harry S. Truman, America’s first Cold War leader. During his 15-minute speech, Rumsfeld sought to draw comparisons between the war on terror and the challenges faced as Truman and his colleagues confronted communism.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld speaks about global terrorism to a crowd at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., March 2, 2006.

“They understood that war had been declared on the free world. They understood we faced an expansionist enemy, in the Soviet Union, out to destroy our way of life,” Rumsfeld said.

“The task of free people was to hold firm over many long decades, in hopes that the truth would win out. That, I submit, is also our task in the global war on terror.”

Winning that war, he said, will attract criticism at home and abroad. It will also require “soft power” efforts – like Radio Free Europe during the 1950s – to attract the support of moderate Muslims.

“I believe there are reformers in the Middle East who have been silenced and intimidated, and who want their countries to be free,” he said. “We must reach out to them.”

Such efforts, he said, are “just beginning.”

The invitation-only audience of about 200 people gave Rumsfeld a friendly reception.

“He knows exactly what he’s talking about,” said Dan Fligge, a retired Marine from Independence who fought in the Korean War. “This is a completely different enemy – no big battles like we used to fight.”