'We Were Founded As A Nation That Practiced Slavery'

Thank you very much. Thank you Brian for your remarks. Thank you PresidentDeGioia for what you said and your leadership at Georgetown. It is kind of hardfor me to get used to a president younger than I am. Thank you Dean Gallucci forhelping me to come here and for the great work you did in our administrationwhen I was president. And I would also like to thank the large number of peoplehere who are my classmates, friends, who served as ambassadors and in otherpositions in my administration. All of them are sitting there thinking that itseemed like yesterday when all of us looked like all of you. So I think I cansay for all of them, we are very grateful for what Georgetown did for us. Weloved it when we were here and we love it still and we are honored to be part ofa family that has given me this opportunity. I would also like to say a specialword of thanks to one of my professors, Fr. Otto Hentz, who is here. He neverabandoned me for all these years, even though he did not succeed in convincingme to become a Jesuit.

I am delighted that so many students are here today. I've come here too manytimes when I thought there were not enough students in this hall, so I am veryglad to see you all and I thank you for coming and I'm sorry that some of youhad to wait in line awhile for the tickets. When I came here ten years ago, asyour president said, it was a remarkable time, a different time. It was the endof the Cold War, the beginning of the global information age-two realities thatgovern our lives today that we now take for granted that seemed quite new then.

One point I made ten years ago still seems to be particularly relevant tenyears later, and I would like to begin with that. Back then I said our foreignpolicies are not really foreign at all anymore. In a world growing ever moreinterdependent, the lines between foreign and domestic policy are becomingmeaningless, distinctions without a difference. I want to resume the discussionon that point today, ten years later, with the benefit or the handicap,depending on your view, of eight years as president, and in light of theunfolding events since September 11.

First let me say that anything I say has to be viewed in the context of mypresent job-I am just a citizen, and as a citizen I support the efforts ofPresident Bush, the national security team, and our allies in fighting thecurrent terrorist threat. I believe we all should. The terrorists who stuck theWorld Trade Center and the Pentagon believed they were attacking the two mostimportant symbols of American materialism and power. I think they were wrongabout that. I live and work in New York, my wife Hillary represents the peopleof New York as a United States senator, I was commander-in-chief of the peoplewho show up and work everyday at the Pentagon. The people who died represent, inmy view, not only the best of America, but the best of the world that I workedhard for eight years to build. A world of great freedom and growing opportunity;a world of citizen responsibility, of growing diversity and sharing community, aworld that looks like the student body here today. Look at you. You are fromeverywhere. Look at us and you will see how more diverse America has grown inthe last thirty plus years. The terrorists killed people who came to America notto die, but dream, from every continent, from dozens of countries, most everyreligion on the face of the earth, including in large numbers Islam. They, thosethat died in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, are part of a verydifferent world and a very different worldview than those who killed them. Now Iwould submit to you that we are now in a struggle with the soul of the 21stcentury and the world in which you students live and raise your own children andmake your own way. I believe that there are several things that as Americans weought to do and I would like to outline them in a fairly direct fashion.

First, we have to win the fight we are in and in that I urge you to keepthree things in mind. First of all, terror, the killing of noncombatants foreconomic, political, or religious reasons has a very long history as long asorganized combat itself, and yet, it has never succeeded as a military strategystanding on its own, but it has been around a long time. Those of us who comefrom various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade,when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim onthe Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describesoldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with bloodrunning up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told totoday in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. Here in the UnitedStates, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were,quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country oncelooked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans weredispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or becausethey were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the pricetoday. Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killedbecause of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk,sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hatecrime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a longhistory.

The second point I want to make is, in that long history, no terroristcampaign standing on its own has ever won, and conventional military strategiesthat have included terrorism with it have won because of conventional militarypower, and terrorism has normally been a negative. I will just give you oneexample from my childhood. In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliantmilitary campaign to cut through the South and go to Atlanta. It was significantand very helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way to, thank God,save the Union. On the way, General Sherman practiced a relatively mild form ofterrorism-he did not kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then heburned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederates. It had nothingwhatever to do with winning the Civil War, but it was a story that was told fora hundred years later, and prevented America from coming together as we mightotherwise have done. When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, whenwe should have been thinking about how we were going to integrate the schoolsand give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionablebehavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago. So, it isimportant to remember that normally terrorism has backfired and never has itsucceeded on its own.

The third point I want to make is that offense always wins first. Ever sincethe first person walked out of a cave with a club and before people figured outyou could put sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and make it ashield, the people who take up arms win first, and then sooner or later,hopefully sooner, decent people get together and figure out how to defendthemselves. When we were born, people thought there would never be a way todefend against continuing nuclear war and we would exterminate ourselves and wefound the only known defense, which was mutually assured destruction, but itworked, and no bomb was ever dropped again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So this is troubling, this Anthrax business. I know it is, and it scares you.And it's troubling when 5,000 people die not in some far away battlefield, butin downtown New York on television. But you have to recognize that unless thisis something different than has ever occurred in human history, we will figureout how to defend ourselves and civilization will endure. A lot of good peoplehave been working hard on this for a long time. In the years that I served,career law enforcement officials working with our intelligence services andothers and people around the world prevented many, many more terrorist attacksthan were successful. Attempts to blow up the Holland tunnel, the Los Angelesairport, to blow up planes flying to the Philippines, an attempt on the Pope'slife, an attempt to blow up the biggest hotel in Jordan over the Millenniumweekend, to destroy a Christian site in the Holy Land, to plant bombs in citiesin the Northwest and the Northeast, and many others. They worked hard tostrengthen the biological weapons convention and to pass the chemical weaponsconvention. They worked hard to begin to build our stock of vaccines, andantibiotics and to support an organized civilian preparedness against the kindof problems we face in the current Anthrax scare. Clearly, we needed to do more.September the 11th happened. And so we are now about the business of improvingour defenses with regard to air travel and other critical infrastructure,against attacks from biological weapons and in two other areas that I think arequite important. We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and getit, and we need some legislation on that, and we also need to continue to workon cyber-terrorism, which is profoundly important. So far we've just beenlaughing about some of these viruses that have invaded our computers and go allaround the country in no time, but a great deal of damage could be done to ourcountry unless we are prepared. And one area where we are woefully lacking isthe simple use of modern computer technology to track people who come into thiscountry with information already readily available. It does not require us toerode people's civil rights or human rights. But our governmental capacity,notwithstanding the fact that we have tripled our investment incounter-terrorism in the last few years, to do what is normally done by massmailing firms, is not there. And we have to support this and we have to supportthe current government and whatever decision they make to do it, even if theyhave to contract with private companies for awhile, but we should be able tofind people who come here and stay around a long time before they organize a bighit. So we will have to support all these things.

But the larger point I want to make is that we will do this, and for all ofyou who've never lived through anything like this, whose childhood was nevercolored by any kind of threat of security: when we were kids a lot of us used tohave to do drills where we would go to fallout shelters where we would run ifanybody ever dropped a nuclear weapon, and you learned to live with it. And thepeople that were taking care of us did a good job, and it never happened. So thefirst thing I want to say to you is you cannot be paralyzed by this. Noterrorist strategy has ever prevailed, people who want to damage always win thebeginning but people always figure out defenses. And the ultimate purpose ofterrorism is not to win military victories anyway but to terrorize, to make youafraid to get up in the morning, afraid of the future, and afraid of each other.I met an Egyptian the first day I went down to see the people in the crisiscenter after September 11th. This big Egyptian fellow with tears in his eyessaid, "I'm an Egyptian Muslim American, and I hate what happened worse thanyou do probably, and I'm so afraid my fellow American will never trust meagain." That's what they want. So what I want to say to you first is, wehave to support the war in Afghanistan and the work at home, and it may befrightening to you, but you have to stay centered, and you have to understandthat you're trying to create something that is really special, a country whereeverybody can have a home if they share the same set of values. And you can'tgive in to it. It's going to be all right.

Now the second thing I want to say is, it's not enough to win the fight we'rein. You've probably had some arguments on campus. If not, you've certainly readthem, you've seen on television, there are a lot of people who just don't seethe world the way we do and certainly don't see America in a very favorablelight. And it is quite important that we do more to build the pool of potentialpartners in the world, and shrink the pool of potential terrorists. And that hasnothing to do with the fight we're in. That has to do with what else we do, andthat depends upon basically how you analyze the world. I've been going all overthe world and I've been all over America going through this exercise so I'lltake you through it.

Imagine yourself on September the 10th. Nothing's happened on September 11th.Try to remember how you viewed the world on September 10th. If I had asked youon that day, "What is the single most dominant element of the 21st Centuryworld," what would your answer have been? What would you have said? Sinceyou're living here and we've been doing reasonable well the last few years, Ican think of one of four answers you might have given if you're a positive sortof person. You might have said, "Well, the global economy." Theglobalization of the economy is the most dominant element because it's madeAmerica 22 and a half million jobs and it's lifted more people out of poverty inthe last thirty years than were ever lifted out in all of human history. Or youmight have said, "No, it's the information technology revolution becausethat's what's given us all the productivity that has driven the economicgrowth. " When I became president in January of '93 there were only fiftysites on the worldwide web. When I left office there were 350 million. In eightyears. Today, before the Anthrax scare, there were thirty times as many messagestransmitted by email as the postal services every day in America. Or you mighthave said, "Oh, no, as impressive as those things are, the most significantthing about the early 21st century will be the advances in biologicalsciences." It will rival the significance of the discovery of DNA. It willrival the significance of Newtonian physics. We sequenced the human genome;we're developing microscopic testing mechanisms. Soon we'll be able to identifycancers when they're just a few cells in size. Soon we'll be able to give youngmothers gene cards to take home with their newborn babies and in countries withgood health systems, children will have life expectancies in excess of ninetyyears. Or you might have said, if you're like me and you're into politics andthis kind of thing, you might have said, "No, the most important thingabout the modern world is the growth of democracy and diversity, because that isthe environment within which all the economic growth, all the technologicalgrowth, and all the scientific advances flourish best. I was honored to bepresident at the first time in history when more than half the world's peoplelived under governments of their own choosing, and when America, as witnessed byyour presence here today, and other advanced countries became far more diverseracially, ethnically, and religiously than ever before, and the societies wereactually working, and working better, and I might add, a lot more interestingbecause of our diversity. So, you could have said any of that.

On the other hand, if you live in a poor country or you are more pessimisticyou might have answered one of four negative things. You could have said,"No, no, you got it wrong about the economy. Global poverty will dominatethe early 21st century because half the world's people aren't in this globaleconomy." They live on less than two dollars a day, a billion people liveon less than a dollar a day, a billion and a half people never get a clean glassof water, and one woman dies every minute in childbirth. And that's a recipe forexplosion, and that will dominate the world. Or you might have said, "No,before that happens, the environmental crises will consume us. The shortage ofwater, the deterioration of the oceans from which we get our oxygen, and most ofall global warming. If the earth warms for the next 50 years at the rate of thelast ten, we'll lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island. The Florida Everglades Iworked so hard to save. Whole Pacific Island nations will be flooded, and tensof millions of food refugees will be created, destabilizing governments andcausing violence. Or you could have said, "Well, no, before global warminggets us the epidemics will. All over the world public health systems arecrashing down, and just to take AIDS as an example, there are now over 36million AIDS cases, 22 million people have already died. If we don't turn thetrend around there will be 100 million AIDS cases in five years, making it theworst epidemic since the Plague swept Europe in the 14th century and killed onein four people.