PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON
IPA
HYATT REGENCY, CHICAGO
Saturday, December 8, 2001
You can also view his entire speech atClinton Presidential Center
(Introduction by John Burgess) Quickly, I want to go through some statistical data from the 1970's versus the 1990's. The annual growth rate in the 1970's in the United States of America averaged 1.98%. During the Clinton presidency it averaged 4.04%. The annual inflation in the '70's in America averaged 7.84%. During the Clinton administration it averaged 1.85%. Unemployment averaged 7.24% in the '70's, and averaged 4.96% during the Clinton administration. Non-farm productivity increased during the '70's, averaged .088%, less than 1%, and during the Clinton administration averaged 2.14%. On that note, I'd like to introduce President Clinton to you.
(President Clinton) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. John, thank you for that introduction. That's one of the briefest and most effective introductions I've ever had. I wish Hillary would have been here to hear that, because she's always saying that the problem with Washington is, it's an evidence-free zone. And, think about that. How many times have you ever been in one of those? So, I'm very grateful for that.
I want to thank John and Dana for being such good friends to Hillary and to me, and for giving me the chance to come by and visit with you. I thank all the many people I've had a chance to visit with earlier tonight. And, many kind things were said, and, a lot of shared experiences, and I'm delighted to be here. I want to thank Senator Dick Durbin for being here, and tell you that I think that he is one of the finest public servants in America today, and one of the greatest members of the U.S. Senate. I'm delighted to see him.
It was a joy for me to serve with him, and to work with him, and to know that if he was on your side you didn't have to worry about someone wilting in the stretch. And Illinois is very, very fortunate to have him. I'm glad to see my old friend Roland Burris here, and Congressman Blagojevich who was here earlier. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you.
Earlier today I saw another Chicagoan that I'm very grateful to. Bill Daley came and introduced me at a lunch that some of you were here for, and he was a great Secretary of Commerce, and now he's the president of Southwestern Bell, which serves Arkansas in telephone coverage. I accuse him of changing places with me entirely. He came to New York and he didn't want to be a big-time financier, so he left New York for me, and went to provide my kinfolks telephone service--where he will become much wealthier than almost everyone in New York.
You all look beautiful in your black ties and ball gowns. I half expected here to see at least 50 people in war paint for the Packer's game tomorrow, but I wish you well. I was for the Bears when they were losing, so this is a very happy time for me. I see some… you got some Green Bay people over there, I heard.
Since John was kind enough to talk a little about the economic statistics of the country, I think that I should acknowledge that while there are a lot of companies who meet every year and celebrate their successes, there aren't too many that have as much to celebrate as you do. Over the past 8 years, during the longest economic expansion in American history you grew faster than any management consulting company in history, and I congratulate you for that. And the small and medium-size businesses that you helped to flourish fueled America's economic growth. During my years as President, more than half the employees were in small- and medium-size businesses, but three-quarters of the 22-1/2 million new jobs in America had come in that sector. These businesses will be as viable to our economic recovery as they were to our expansion because of their initiative, innovation and faith in the future. And I'm glad you're helping them.
I think I should begin tonight by saying that the work you do and the people with whom you work represent in America is very different from the one the terrorists thought they were striking on September 11th. They completely misunderstood the meaning of our success and the values that underlie it. When they looked at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, why did they pick them as targets? Because they didn't see them as I do, as symbols of American ingenuity and effort, of peace and freedom. Instead they saw them as symbols of corrupt materialism and power. But I live and work in New York, and all of you know Hillary is the junior Senator from that state. I was Commander in Chief of the people who go to work in the Pentagon every day. So to Hillary and me the people who died represent, not only the best in America, but the best of the world. I worked hard as President to create a world with more freedom and opportunity, more citizen responsibility, of both growing diversity and deeper bonds of community.
It's worth noting that people from 80 nations died at the World Trade Center. Irish and Italian Catholic firefighters died to save people very different from them that the terrorists tried to kill. 500 of those who died were Muslims. Those who were killed in New York at the Pentagon and on that plane in Pennsylvania are part of a very different world than those who killed them. Those who killed them believe that our differences are the most important thing in life. Most of the rest of us think our common humanity is more important.
I say this because I'm going to try to take you through what I believe is the meaning of all this. But when it comes right down to it, it is the clash between those two views. Whether you think our differences or our common humanity is more important. That debate will define the shape and the soul of this new century. Victory for our vision depends upon 4 things. First, wining the fight we're in in Afghanistan and improving our defenses against terrorism at home. Second, spreading the benefits and reducing the burdens of the modern world. Third, changing conditions in poor nations to make progress more possible. And fourth, developing a level of consciousness adequate to the present time, about what our responsibilities to each other are, and what our relationships ought to be.
Let me just go through each of these in turn. First of all, with regard to the fight we're in. I would urge you to keep 3 things in mind. First terror, the killing of non-combatants for political, religious, or economic reasons has a very long history--as long as combat itself. No region of the world has been spared it, and few people have entirely clean hands. For example, in 1095 Pope Urban II urged the Christian soldiers to embark on the first crusade to capture Jerusalem. When they did so the first thing they did was to burn a Synagogue with 300 Jews in it. They then proceeded to kill every Muslim woman and child on the Temple mount. And I can assure you that story is still being told today in the Middle East. Right down to the present day, throughout the 20th Century, people continued to be terrorized and killed because of their race or their religion, even in the West. And though we Americans have come a very long way from the days when people could kill black slaves and Native Americans with impunity, still we have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation.
The second point I want to make is that in spite of its long history no terror campaign has ever prevailed and this one won't. The purpose of terror is not military victory, but a change in behavior by its targets, by making them afraid of today, afraid of tomorrow, and afraid of each other. Instead, terror usually backfires leaving bitter memories, and it cannot ever win unless the targets, in this case us, become its unwitting accomplices by letting it change the way we think, and feel, and live.
The third point I want to make about the present moment, both what happened on September 11th and the anthrax scare, and all the other things you're reading about, is that in any new arena of conflict the offensive action always prevails first. Then good people get together and devise defenses that are effective, and civilization goes on. Otherwise we wouldn't be around here. Ever since the first person walked out of a cave with a club and began to beat people up, there was a time lag between that and the time when somebody figured out: "Hey, I could put two sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it, and I would have a shield and the club wouldn't work any more." Keep that in mind.
You think about it. First people, then people had spears, then they had big shields, then people rode on horseback so people built castles with moats around them so the horses couldn't cross. Then people developed catapults to go over the castle walls and so on and on and on.
First the club, then the shield. But the more dangerous the club is, the more important it is to close the time gap between the time it's used and the development of effective defenses. And that's the point that has special relevance today when we consider the potential of weapons of mass destruction and powerful traditional weapons. There are things like airplanes that can be turned into weapons. The modern world has known quite a lot of terror. Just since 1995 there have been 2,100 terrorists acts, but fewer than 20 in the United States. And until September 11th, only Oklahoma City--a homegrown terrorist incident, had claimed any significant number of lives. The Europeans have been living with it for 3 decades, and America has been fighting it at least since 1983 when 241 of our Marines were murdered in a suicide attack in Beirut, Lebanon.
In the years that I served as president, career law enforcement officials worked very hard to improve our defenses to bring terrorists to justice, to get better intelligence--all in the hope that a day like September 11th would never come. They thwarted attempts to blow up the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Los Angeles Airport, several planes flying from Los Angeles to the Philippines--all thwarted. They thwarted an attempt on the Pope's life. They thwarted attempts to plant bombs in cities in the Northeast, in the Northwest, to destroy the largest hotel in Aman Jordan, and a Christian site in the Holy Land, all just over the Millennium weekend alone.
During that time the people who did Oklahoma City, Pan Am 103, the CIA attacks, the African Embassy bombings all were indicted, tried, and convicted in the United States. We ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention to control better the development of chemical weapons and the spread of chemicals that can be used by terrorists to make weapons. We tried to strengthen the biological weapons convention. We hugely increased, thanks to Congress, Senator Durbin, the counter-terrorism budgets. We began funding civil response teams in 130 of our largest cities, including Chicago. We began to stockpile vaccines and antibiotics and researching what could be a very important question in the years ahead, which is how to quickly develop an antidote to a variant toxin. If somebody comes up with smallpox B or anthrax G that will do as much damage, and the traditional antidote doesn't work any more.
The main point I want to make is that good people have been working on this a long time. They prevented more attacks than have prevailed. They are getting better at it and we will continue to improve. But, obviously, we have a lot more to do to improve our defenses for all forms of transportation and other critical infrastructure. The airline security legislation that Congress just passed is a very good step. We also have to keep strengthening our defenses against cyber-terrorism, people that would break into our computer networks and take down the financial infrastructure of America. We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money that keeps the terrorists running.
Last year we tried to pass tougher money laundering legislation and our regulations were strengthened. Just a handful of senators defeated it, and I hope it'll be passed this year. We must improve our computer tracking capacity. This is something a lot of you will find interesting because you deal with data processing. And we have to integrate the information systems of our domestic law enforcement agencies and our intelligence agencies.
Believe it or not, private companies who do mostly mass mailing for a living have a greater capacity to track the whereabouts and activities of Americans and immigrants, including potential terrorists, using public information long available than the government has. That's an area where we have to catch up, and catch up in a hurry.
And finally, we've got to do more work to secure the stocks of weapons of mass destruction. Where there are chemical or biological agents, or nuclear material that can be made into a bomb, we have got to do everything we can to make sure that material is secure and the people who are dealing with it are trustworthy. Not long before I became President, in 1991 two United States senators, Senator Nunn, Sam Nunn from Georgia and Senator Dick Lugar from Indiana, passed a landmark piece of legislation which has become known as Nunn-Lugar. They provided funds, which we used in my time among other things, to bring in all the nuclear weapons that the former Soviet Union had outside Russia. We brought them back to Russia and begin to destroy them and in the process to pay for a lot of these scientists who, otherwise, would have had no way to make a living and might have been hired by nations that are hostile to us or terrorists units. We also hired some people who were working in the biological weapons field. And we made a lot of progress. But it's--I'm sure any member of Congress can tell you who's been following this--we still have a lot to do on that. And, so I recommended right before I left office another big increase in Nunn-Lugar spending. We can double it for less than it cost us to fight the war in Afghanistan for one month. So we're not talking about big money here. But there are 40,000 people who work in the former Soviet Union who, when they were our adversaries, worked in the chemical, biological, or nuclear fields. They need to be able to make a living doing something that's good and it's a lot cheaper than going to war. So one of the things that I very much hope Congress will do this year is to put much more money into that. It's easier to prevent one of these things than it is to clean up after it happens.
So we need to do all that, but let's not forget the larger point. In all of human history no terror campaign has ever worked. The campaign in Afghanistan is succeeding. Our military is doing a terrific job and you should all be very proud of them. Our efforts to organize the defense of our homeland have to be more various and more complex, but they are getting better and they will continue to improve. Now I can't say there'll be no more terrorist attacks--there probably will be, but they will not weaken or change America unless we give in. Unless we help them. Unless we change the way we think and feel, and live. So that part of this is going to be okay. But that brings me to the second point.
Winning the fight we're in and improving our defenses at home are absolutely necessary, but they are not sufficient to build the kind of world that I believe we want for our children and grandchildren. A world where we don't have to live behind gated fences, and all of us don't need a security guard, and we don't have to look under the car every time we start it to see if we're going to blow up. If you want that kind of a world we have to have more partners and fewer terrorists, and that will require a much more sustained effort. Again, one that we tried to begin. And I'll say again, Congressman and Senator, I'm very grateful for the help that you gave me in that. But I want to talk a little about that.
Let me just begin with what I think this is all about. Try to think about where you were on September 10th and what you were thinking about. If somebody just come up to you and said, "What do you think is the driving force of the early 21st Century world? What's the most important factor of this new world we're living in?" On September 10th what would you have answered? Now if you live in a wealthy country and your company has been doing well, and you were optimistic, you might have said, "Oh the global economy, of course. It's given America 22-1/2 million new jobs and lifted more people around the world out of poverty than in the last 20 years than in any period in history." Or you might have said, if you're into technology, "No, no, no, it's the information technology revolution because that gave us the productivity figures John talked about, and it was the productivity that drove the economy."
When I became president there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web in 1993. When I left office there were 350 million and rising. Amazing. In 1994 we only had about 11% of our schools and 3% of our classrooms connected to the Internet. When I left office we had 95% of our schools and almost 70% of our classrooms connected. They--even before the anthrax scare slowed the mails--30 times as many messages were transmitted by e-mail every day as by the Postal Service, or what my daughter's generation calls "snail mail." So you could have said the information technology revolution. Or you might have said, "No, even more important than that will be the advances in sciences, especially the biological sciences. They will rival in significance the discovery of DNA or Newtonian physics." For example, we are developing microscopic testing mechanisms with something called nano-technology, super micro technology that will enable, soon, people to go in for cancer tests and find tumors that are just a few cells in size--a few sells in size, totally undetectable today--raising the prospect that all cancer will become curable.
Researchers are working now on digital chips to replicate sophisticated spinal nerve movements, with a view toward developing a chip that can work for a severed spine the way a pacemaker works for a heart--raising the prospect that people long paralyzed will stand up and walk. Young mothers soon will come home from the hospital with a little gene card, now that we have sequenced the human genome, and already identified the two variants that are the highest predictors of breast cancer, and getting very close on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Soon the young women in this audience that are in their child-bearing years will be able to come home with babies from the hospital with a little gene card and, that'll be good news and bad news. It'll say, okay, here are your child's problems. Your child has a 2 in 5 chance of developing breast cancer between the ages of 35 and 45, but if you do the following 5 things you'll cut it to 1 in 10. And when that happens our children will have very quickly, just in the next few years, young children in America will be born with a life expectancy in excess of 90 years--something totally inconceivable just a few years ago. So you might have said that. Or, if like some of us at this table, you're into politics, you might have said, "No, the most important thing in the modern world is the spread of democracy and diversity within democratic societies because that has created the environment that has made the economic growth, the technological progress, and the scientific advances all possible."
I was honored to be President at the first time in all of human history when more than half the world's people lived under governments that they chose with elections, and when democracies became more and more diverse. Just look around this room. If this company had had this meeting 40 years ago, do you think that this room would look like it does tonight? I don't think so.
So you might have said one of those 4 positive answers. On the other hand, if I'd asked you this and you just filed for bankruptcy, or you came from a poor country, or you were profoundly alienated, or you just happened to be what Hillary calls your family's designated worrier--every family's got one, I think--you might have given 1 of 4 negative answers.
You might have answered the question in this way. You might have said, "No, you've got it all wrong about the economy. The real problem is global poverty because half the people aren't part of this new economy. Half the people--think about this when you go home tonight--half the people live on less than $2 a day. In the world today, a billion people live on less than $1 a day. A billion people go to bed hungry every night. A billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water, and 1 woman dies every minute in childbirth--all because of global poverty.
Or, you might have said, "No, the biggest problem is the deterioration of the environment under the combined pressures of economic growth and population growth." The oceans which provide most of our oxygen are deteriorating. I've already said there's a terrific water shortage. And most important there's global warming. If the world warms at, for the next 50 years, at the rate of the next 10, we will lose the Florida Everglades, that I worked so hard to save, with rising water tables. We will lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island. Whole island nations in the Pacific will be flooded. Agricultural production patterns will be completely disrupted. And there will be millions of food refugees causing more war and disruption.
Or you might have said, "But even before global warming gets us, the global health crisis will." All over the world you see public health systems breaking down and epidemics rising up. Today we had a luncheon, that John and Dana and many of you attended, to raise funds for and to support the International Association of Physicians, who go around the world fighting AIDS. But if you just take AIDS--we have 40 million AIDS cases--25 million people have died of AIDS. 70% of the cases are in Africa, but the fastest growing rates of AIDS are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's back door. The second fastest growing rates are in the Caribbean, on American's front door.
My wife represents a million Dominicans just in New York alone. The third fastest growing rates are in India, the biggest democracy in the world, which has about 10 million cases now--more than any other country outside Africa. The fourth big rate and problem is in China, the world's biggest country, which just admitted they have twice as many cases as they had previously thought, and only 4% of the adults have any idea how AIDS is contracted and spread.
Now, if these trends continue we'll have 100 million AIDS cases in 2005. Again, what fragile democracies will fall? You have a lot more wars, and you have a lot of young people in poor countries thinking they're not going to live more than another year anyway. Why shouldn't they go get a gun and shoot each other? It's a very profoundly serious problem.
Or, you might have said, even on September 10th, "Before poverty, before AIDS, before global warming gets us, the world will be consumed by high tech terrorism--the marriage of modern weapons of destruction to ancient religious, racial, ethnic and tribal hatreds. If you look at, in recent years, Rwanda, Sierra Leon, the Balkans, East Tambour, the Middle East, or Northern Ireland until, God bless them, my people finally did the right thing a few weeks ago. It is ironic that in this most modern of ages we are still bedeviled by the oldest demon of human society. We're just afraid of people who are different from us. And it's a short step from being afraid, to hating people, to dehumanizing them, to killing them. And if you think that people who are different from you are so different that they're basically evil, they're outside God's grace, then how do you compromise with them? You have to make exclusive claims and fight to the death.
Now, I just painted a picture of the modern world, and I hope that everything I said had some resonance with you. But I said 4 good things, right? The economy, technology, science, democracy. And 4 troubling things. Poverty, global warming, the health epidemic and terrorism. What do they all have in common? Because they're all true. They all reflect a most astonishing increase in global interdependence in human history. Philosophers and theologians have talked about how we're all part of the seamless web for millennia. The New Testament and Jesus say you should love your neighbor as yourself. The Torah says he who turns away from a stranger might as well turn away from the most high God. The Koran says Ala put different peoples on the earth, not that they might despise one another but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another. So we've been talking about this a long time. But it's one thing to talk it and another to believe it.
For 50 years politicians have been talking seriously about our interdependence. Ever since World War II, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and then afterward the growth of the cold war and the establishment of global financial institutions in the United Nations. We sort of understood this as a fact, but today our interdependence is a fact no ordinary citizen anywhere in the world can escape. The truth is we live in a world without effective borders. Borders don't stop much, good or bad any more. Where technology and information are wildly spread and we can all get around in a terrific hurry. Now, we can't claim the benefits of that world without shouldering the increased risks. This is a central point I'm trying to make, and one I think you have to understand.
September 11th was shattering to us because Americans didn't die in nice uniforms on a distant shore. People died at home on television and we knew a lot of them. And it wasn't supposed to happen here because we were a big country protected by two oceans. But September 11th is the dark side of the age of interdependence. That's why we can win the fight against terrorism, and we have to. We can improve our defenses and we have to. But it isn't enough if you want your children and your grandchildren, and their grandchildren to have a free and open life--to have the kind of life we've enjoyed the last decade in America. To do that you gotta make a world that has far fewer terrorists and a whole lot more partners. To do that you have to spread the benefits of this world to people who don't have them, reduce the burdens and then help people help themselves. Because there's some places you can't help to save your life because progress is not possible. They haven't done what they have to do. That's what you do in consulting is that you go out and help people help themselves. So we have to think about that. And you know, I, I won't go into any great detail here, but just let me say that there are at least 4 things that we can do to help spread the benefits and shrink the burdens.
We have to reduce global poverty. Last year one of the proudest achievements I had in 8 years as President was the overwhelming bipartisan consensus to reduce the debt of the poorest countries in the world if they put all the money into education, healthcare, and economic development. And the countries that did that, it's amazing what they've done. Uganda took their debt release savings in one year and doubled primary school enrollment and cut class size. That's just one example. There are lots of proven strategies for that, but we need to do more of that. It costs money but it's a lot cheaper than going to war. We need to respond to the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan's call for $7 to $10 billion a year to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases. One in four of all the people who will die on earth this year--1 in 4--will die of AIDS, TB, malaria, or infections related to diarrhea. Most of them are with kids who never got a clean glass of water. $7 to $10 billion--our share of that will be $2.2 billion. It's a lot of money, a lot cheaper than going to war. That's about 2 months of the war in Afghanistan to help hundreds of millions of people.
There are 100 million children in the world who never go to school. Or in the case of Pakistan they wound up going to these Madras's run by radical fundamentalists who indoctrinated rather than educated them. In my last year as President we got $300 million and a $1.8 trillion budget. $300 million to give to poor countries to provide a nutritious meal in school to kids, but only if the parents sent the child to school to get it. I just got the reports. Enrollments are exploding in these countries. Do you know how much $300 million will feed? You know what it will do? Let me just give you an example. $300 million will provide a nutritious meal in school every day of the school year for 6 million children. Now, I'll give you just one other example. Brazil is the only developing country that has 97% of its kids in school. Why? Because the government of Brazil pays the mother, not the fathers, the mothers, in the 30% of the poorest families if they send their kids to school 85% of the time. They give you 15 bucks a month a kid. And they cap it at 3 kids. So, if you get, if you have more kids you can only get 45 bucks a month. But they all have to come. They get a little certificate that they were there 85% of the time and they cash out. Now, I think that's pretty cheap to get 97% of your kids in school. And 10 years from now every year of schooling that a child in a poor country gets ads 10 to 20% to his or her income. Every year. So 10 years from now Brazil's going to be a lot richer because they spent a little money. America, Japan, Europe, we ought to put the rest of those kids in school.
Same argument applies to global warming. There's a trillion dollar market out there that a lot of businesses in America and around the world could tap into of already available alternative energy and energy conservation technologies that would clean up the environment, not put so many greenhouse gases in the air and actually create jobs. And we got to get out of denial about that and instead, go do it. If you, if we have 20… you know, it was a warm day in Chicago, today. It's been 70 in New York. You can still play golf in New York in December, which is unheard of. Global warming is wonderful in particular, but still in general, it's terrible. And we have got to do something about it. And we can do something about it in a way that helps the American economy and the economy of these other countries. So that's the first point I want to make.
The second point is there are some countries that can't be helped because they're not organized. There are countries, for example, that are well organized to drive their AIDS rates down, so Uganda cuts their rate in half in 5 years with prevention programs. In other countries that are in denial like Botswana was for years… the richest country in sub- Sahara in Africa has almost a third of its people who are HIV positive now. Why, because there were cultural inhibitions about talking about this and they didn't deal with it. The same thing is true of the economy, the education, anything else. Where there must be conditions in these countries that make progress possible. For America that means primarily we have to keep advancing democracy and human rights. Especially true in the Middle East. It is no accident that most of these terrorists come from places where they never got to vote for anybody for mayor. And I'll tell you why. If, if you never get to take responsibility for yourselves then a country can become like a child. You think of your children, those of you who have grown children. How scared were you the first time they went to school. The first time they got on a bicycle. The first time, God forbid, they went on a car date. When they went off to college. And you knew that every step along the way--or when they joined the military--you knew every step along the way, something terrible could happen to them. And nothing, none of that would happen if you just kept them in the closet and shoved food under the door. On the other hand, when they were 25, they'd still be 6 years old, right?
So we let our children go, and we hope to God that they have good fortune and, and blessings, and hope they--and they make mistakes--and they learn from them. And that's what life is like. That's what democracy's like. And it is easier to blame people's distress on America's success if they never had to take any responsibility for themselves. So it's very important. And we have to take a special care for the Muslim world. And I just want to say this. It is not true that all, that Islam is the enemy of America, and it is certainly not true that America is the enemy of Islam. We have 6 million Muslims who pursue their faith and do well in this country--many of them in the Midwest-a huge concentration in your neighbor in Michigan. And I was very proud that President Bush went to, to a Mosque and visited with Muslim leaders right after September 11th and then had a Muslim . . . at the end of Ramadan. I was the first president ever to bring in Muslims and widely consult them on issues and to observe the feast of Edelfitter every year. That's good but we're not getting our story out over there. And there is a war raging within the Muslim world about what they think about us, in general, and the West, Israel and what the source of their problems are.
A lot of Muslims are very frustrated with their own conditions, and they believe that the modern world, which we represent, is a threat to their values, destructive to their way of life, hostile to their economic well-being. The battle is being fought in the Middle East and Central Asia. You read about that. It's also being fought here. We have an Afghan Mosque in New York City. On September 12th the Amaham at the Mosque was a standup guy. Man, he got up in the Mosque and he condemned the terrorism and said it violated Islam and it was wrong. But a minority of his congregation went outside and started worshiping in the parking lot. The New Republic ran a story about a prominent conservative activist who got in trouble with the White House because some of the Muslims he was bringing into the Oval Office wound up having supported Bin Laden or Hammas, or Hisbalah or others, because they believe they were doing the right thing to Ala, but they had no business in the White House.
The only point I'm trying to make is, there is a debate here. We have to strengthen the forces in moderation. We have to make it clear we're not the enemy of Islam, but we are the enemy of terror. And we are the enemy of anybody who believes that they have a right to kill innocent people to impose their version of the truth. Let me just give you an example of the things that people don't know and that's true of Pakistan, for example, that borders Afghanistan, where they sell Mr. Bin Laden's T-shirts and think he's a hero. They don't know that the last time we used military power before this war was to protect the lives of poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. They don't know that. They don't know that. They don't know that late last year and early this year before I left office we advocated, and the Israeli's accepted, but the PLO rejected, the most generous terms ever offered to resolve the crisis in the Middle East including a Palestinian state with virtually all of the West Bank and the religious and political interests of the Muslims and the Palestinians protected in Jerusalem. They don't know 500 Muslims died at the World Trade Center. That is a violation of the Koran for a Muslim to knowingly kill another. They don't know that recently, you may not know this, the FBI asked for 200 Arabic speakers to help fight terrorism and 15,000 people applied to help. And they don't know that when 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somalis died in 1993 in that fire fight that Mr. Bin Laden crows about all the time. He brags about, you know, how he helped to train the Somalis that killed our soldiers. But he never tells you the truth, the whole truth. You know what those soldiers were doing there? They were asked by the United Nations to arrest Mohammad Adid, the Somali leader, because he had murdered 22 of our fellow peacekeepers. Do you know who they were? 22 Pakistani Muslims. So they never tell you the whole story. So we've got to get our story out. Which brings me to the last point I want to make.
So, we've got to win the fight against terrorism and prove our domestic defenses--spread the benefits and reduce the burdens, promote democracy and human rights, and win the argument in the Muslim world to strengthen the moderates. But it all comes down to this big question. What, how are we going to relate to each other? These fundamentalists that attacked us, they're like fanatics everywhere throughout history. They have very different notions about the nature of truth, the value of life, the concept of community. Now, if you don't remember everything I have said tonight, remember this: they think they have the truth, the whole truth. If you have it and you share it, your life has value. If not, you're a legitimate target. Even if you're just a 6-year-old girl who went to work with her mother at the World Trade Center on September 11th. We think nobody's got the truth. That's what it means to be a human being; you're finite, that life is a journey where you hopefully get more of the truth as you go along. And you learn from other people so everybody ought to have a right to make the journey. And that leads us to very different notions about community. They think a community are people who think alike, talk alike, act alike with rules enforced by brutality, if necessary. And we've all seen that.
Most of us believe a community is whoever wants to be part of it who accepts the rules. Everybody deserves a chance; everybody has a responsible role to play. We all do better when we help each other. It all comes down to this. What's more important--our differences or our common humanity? Now, it's easy to give the right answer, but it's hard to live the right answer. We can all sit here at dinner and live the right answer, but will you really remember tonight when you go home that a billion people will go to bed when you do, hungry? And 2 billion, a third of all the people on earth, lived on less that $2 today. 3 billion people. It's hard to live the right answer. It's easy for us. It's easier to live defined by your differences and to fight over them. Just think about in my lifetime 2 heroes of my youth, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed trying to reconcile the American people to each other. Mohandas Ghandi, the greatest spirit of the age was killed, not by a Pakistani Muslim, but by a Hindu, a fellow Hindu. Why? Because the guy thought he was not a good Hindu or a good Indian because he wanted India for the Muslims, and the Janes and the Sikhs, and the Jews, and the Christians, and whoever else showed up. Sadat was murdered in Egypt, not by an Israeli commando, but by an Egyptian who thought he wasn't a good Egyptian or a good Muslim because he was not for a theocracy. And he wanted to make peace with Israel. One of the greatest men I ever knew, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered, not by a Palestinian terrorist, but by a fellow Israeli who thought he was not a good Jew or a good Israeli because he wanted to give up a lifetime of fighting and find a secure peace for Israel by reconciling with the Palestinian's and their legitimate aspirations. The answer is easy to give, but hard to live. We live in a world without walls. We cannot escape it. Therefore, our only choice is to make it a home for all of our children. Thank you. (applause) Thank you.
(John Burgess) We received about 100 questions from various people to ask the President, and I'd like to start with one from Susan Hacket. She is a Business Coordinator. Susan's question is: "I have a 10-year-old daughter who was deeply affected by the World Trade Center crisis. If your daughter were 10 years old now, how would you explain the situation to her and assure her of her safety and the safety of the United States?"
(President Clinton) First of all I would not talk down to her or misrepresent the truth. I would tell her a simpler version of what I told you tonight. I would tell her that there are people who blame America for their problems and because we live in a world where America welcomes children of all different races and religions and backgrounds it's easier for people to sneak in here who want to hurt people. But that very good people are trying to protect her and that we are going to be all right. That's what I would tell her, because that's what I believe the truth is. But I would not tell her that nothing bad will ever happen again, because that's not true. Let me just say parenthetically, this is a much bigger problem for people more or less 25 and under, than for older people. Because if you think about it, when they came of age, the "cold war" had been over for 12 years, and it was effectively over before that. And most of their parents didn't have parents that talked to them about Viet Nam. Unlike an earlier generation they didn't have parents that talked to them about Korea or World War II. Unlike my generation, they didn't have breaks at school where they learned to hide under their desk or go to some fall-out shelter and practice what they would do in the event of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. So this was very shocking to a lot of young people, including kids that are older than 10. And it's not just in America.
I was in Canada the other day, in Calgary, and I was talking to one of the social service providers there who said they had a big increase in requests for mental health services among young people since September 11th. So the most important thing I think you can do is to talk to young people about it. But you need to tell them that people who do what was done to us have never conquered a country, and that good people are working very hard on this and they're going to get better at it, and American's going to be all right and so is your daughter. But don't tell them that there'll never be another incident like this because then you'll have to go explain something else to your kids if we're not successful.
We prevented a lot more than they've succeeded. There have been probably some more prevented since September 11th that I don't know about and you don't know about. But if you just tell people that people have done this kind of thing throughout human history--they're wrong, they're full of hatred, we're going to defeat them and we're going to try to make a world where children don't grow up hating us and hating each other. That's the best I think you can do. You need a balance of reassurance and reality. This is a time when you have to give your child courage as well as security. Think about how the children are raised in Israel. Think about how they were raised in Northern Ireland. Think about how they were raised in other places. One other point I'd like to make about this to those of you who are older, like me, that when your kids get older you can tell them. The thing that makes this frightening is it happened to us at home and on television. It had an immediacy that was painful, and it happened to innocent people who were not combatants. They didn't like sign up for the Army and go off. But let me just remind you that the century we just left was the bloodiest century in all human history, and I think it is highly unlikely--no matter how much terrorism we have in the 21st Century--it is highly unlikely that this century will claim as many innocent lives as the last one.
Let me just remind you, 9 million people died in World War I. 20 million people died between the wars. Over 20 million people died in World War II. 20 million people died from awful governments after World War II. Over a million people died in Korea. Almost a million people died in Viet Nam. 700,000 people died in Rwanda. 250,000 people died in Bosnia. I don't think that this new century is going to claim as many innocent lives as the last one did. But you can't tell your 10-year-old daughter that we live in a world where nothing bad ever happens to people. One of the things you have to learn in growing up is, sometimes bad things happen, but if good people do the right things usually it doesn't, and you have to live with courage as well as security.
(John Burgess) The next question comes from Jan Ferry in the marketing division. "What are your views of the world and U.S. economy for the next 12 months?" (President Clinton) I think it'll be a little tough for the next 12 months. But I think the markets will come back before the sort of "on-the-street" economy comes back. That's what happened during the last recession. I think we'll have a fairly quick rebound. I'm actually more worried about the 10-year projections than I am what's going to happen in the next year or two. I think within a year and a half we'll be pretty well into a fairly good recovery. But I am worried that, and I think it's fine, by the way, that we're spending the money we have to spend to deal with our defenses, to deal with the recession. One of the reasons I worked hard to get rid of the permanent deficit and pay down--we paid down $550 billion on the debt--is because you know life is never going to be totally free of adversity or emergency. And our economy has been able to absorb these costs much easier, because in the last 3 years we actually paid $550 billion down on our debt in addition to balancing the budget. So I'd be fairly upbeat about that.
The thing I think you're going to have to watch is 3 or 4 years from now, if the full impact of the tax cut that was passed before this emergency, before we ever had any idea what the budget was, before we ever had any idea what our costs were going to be, we passed a tax cut without having a clue about where we were going, which I think was a terrible mistake. And it benefits mostly people in the income group I have now entered, thank you very much. Thanks to you, in part. But, most of us, what we need is stable, long-term, low, low interest rates. And it looks like we're going back into a situation of permanent structural deficit.
Two bad things will happen which will cause real problems for the economy starting about 4 or 5 years from now. One is people will figure out we're going to have a long-term structural deficit, and the long-term rates will go up again. And so even if there's not much inflation we'll have a gap between the short rates and the long rates and that'll slow economic growth. The other is that we won't have any money to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers. And one of the reasons I wanted America to run a surplus and just basically get as close to debt free as we could is so we could absorb the retirement of the baby boomers without--and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers so I'm sensitive to this.
But most of the people I grew up with didn't graduate from college. Most of them are middle class working people. Most of them are small business people or employees, and they all worry about their retirement being an enormous burden on their children and their grandchildren. And so I just hope that we don't do something shortsighted now that causes enormous burdens when we all start to retire, which will begin a little bit in 8 years, in full force in 10. But, I think in the near term, 12 months, we'll be in the midst of the recovery, and I think that within about 18 months, it'll be fairly robust. If I were a small business person I certainly wouldn't pack it in. The fundamental strengths of this economy are extraordinary. And I just wouldn't worry about it. I'd go on and do my business. Hold down costs, increase revenues, and rip out. That's what I'd do. That's what I'd do.
(John Burgess) The last question is from Mike Rudd, Consulting Services Division, a project manager. "The overriding feeling when I interact with a small business owner is fear. It's primarily fear of the unknown. My question is, what message would you send to the small business community to allay the fear and how to prepare and perceive uncertain business environments?"
(President Clinton) We were talking before we came out here about people and their ambitions, and their futures. I told them the best statement on ambition I ever heard came from Abraham Lincoln when he was a young man. Abraham Lincoln did not know there was going to be a Civil War. He did not know there was going to be a Republican party. There was no Republican party. He didn't have a clue what the issues were going to be. Right? Just like you when you show up for work tomorrow you don't know what's going to happen 5 years from now. Here's what he said. The greatest one-sentence statement I ever heard. "I will work and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come." That's the best I can do for you.
Get all the information that you can. If you've got to borrow money to finance your business, to finance inventories or expansions, I think open markets will persist and for the next 5 years energy prices will be manageable. That's what I think will happen. Then starting in about 5 years there's going to be a terrible oil shortage unless we are much less oil dependent, but we may be all driving around in hydrogen powered vehicles by then. Nobody can know what's going to happen. It's going to be a terrible problem; it'll be about 5 years from now.
For the next 5 years you're looking in all probability at quite reasonable inflation. For the next 5 years--because even if we run deficits we paid down so much of the debt it's going to be a smaller percentage of our income than it was 5 years ago or 10 years ago--we should have manageable interest rates. We have strong fundamental markets. People still want to come to America. People still want to do business in America. So that means that the overall environment is going to be pretty good. I will be astonished if there's a big stock market collapse. I think the tech stocks were over-valued and some of the traditional stocks were over-valued for all kinds of obvious reasons, but they're building their way back. I think the economy--we may not have the growth rate of the '90's, but I think it will be solid, and I think that people who are good at what they do, who work and get ready, and are good at what they do will do fine. Look. One reason people can make money in this environment is that it is unpredictable. It's more open; it's more malleable. You can create things. If it were totally predictable we might have 1% growth and ˝% inflation from now until the end of time and we'd all be so bored we wouldn't know what we were doing. So I would say to small business people, I think the overall strength of this economy and the vibrancy of it carries more weight than anything else. You're not going to stop the increased productivity that's going to be generated in the private sector and the stuff that the research will bring out. I'm not pessimistic. The people in the 20th Century who have bet against America have lost a heck of a lot more money than the people who have bet on it. And I would bet on it.