Remarks at Town Hall Meeting

As Prepared

Congressman Kingston, thank you for that kind introduction, for your inspired words, and also for the opportunity to be here today in your district, meeting with the people of Savannah. I also want to thank President Jones and Bill Daugherty of Armstrong Atlantic, as well as the students of this university for hosting this event, and I thank all of you who are here today on this fine fall morning.

I know many of you are veterans or members of our military community -- Savannah and the surrounding area are home to the 3^rdInfantry division based at Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield, as well as elements of our navy at King’s Bay Submarine Base. In addition, 1,000 other members of our active duty force claim Savannah as their hometown, as do another 2,700 who are in the reserves. This means that there are mothers and fathers, spouses and children, brothers and sisters, families all across this town -- and probably in this room today -- who have a loved one whose life could potentially be on the line if we go to war in Iraq. Some of you may have already risked your lives in Afghanistan or in past conflicts on behalf of this country. And so many of us here know in a personal way that any time we go to war, there may be a very real and immediate cost to us as a nation. Just as there may be a cost for all civilians unlucky enough to live around the world’s battlefields.

Until Sept 11th, we in this nation had the luxury of not having to worry about living on the edge of a combat zone. But in the year since, we have had to come to terms with a new reality. We cannot take the safety of our homeland for granted.

And so we find ourselves starting a promising new century with this challenge: The need to preserve our liberty while we protect our security. We have an enemy who actually invaded our country and turned our strength into a vulnerability. They took advantage of our mobility, our openness, and our tolerance.

But we have made great strides in taking the steps to protect ourselves, and you all can be proud of your own efforts. After September 11th, I think we all recognized that there was no choice. We had to protect our homeland, and we had to go to war against al-Qaida. This shadowy organization has pledged to destroy us, and has already destroyed far too many lives -- not just in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but also in Khobar Towers, in our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and in the USS Cole. After September 11th, we all understood that these terrorists will not stop unless we stop them. And we are.

I know the headlines can be grim, with the recent carnage in Bali and the killing of a US Marine in Kuwait. But I want to assure each of you today that while it will take a sustained effort over time to prevail against al-Qaida, we have made tremendous gains against these killers. Most of our victories are discreet. Many are nearly daily. All are the concerted effort of a number of nations.

It would probably be more reassuring if I could tell you stories of armies facing each other on a battlefield where someone clearly loses, and someone clearly wins. But the battles we are winning today are no less effective and far less lethal for our own forces. Not only have we broken the awful grip the Taliban and al-Qaida held over the lives of the 23 million people of Afghanistan, we are actually building the permanent capacity to counter terrorism all around the world. So this means freezing and seizing financial assets, but also giving our partners in other nations the tools and skills to permanently destroy and disrupt the money trails that keep the terrorists in business.

It means keeping these people on the run with a string of high-profile arrests in dozens of nations. In recent weeks alone, we have seen the capture in Karachi by Pakistani officials of a key figure in the 9/11 attacks, the indictment in Germany of the guiding light of the Hamburg cell where Mohammad Atta finalized his plans, and the detention in Singapore of 21 members of the Jemaah Islamiyah, who were planning attacks against American targets in southeast Asia.

But we are also working with local law enforcement officials around the world to provide the training and the technical skills to make a long-term improvement in the ability of other nations to prevent such criminal activity in the first place.

Clearly, this fight is far from over, and we have likely not heard the last from these terrorists. But what I want to tell you all today is that we are making steady progress -- not just in our ability to defeat them today, but in building the means around the world to defeat them for good. Even when the need to use force is as obvious as it was after September 11th, the truth is that nobody really wants to go to war.

I think it is fair to say that Americans are a combative people. After all, who here hasn’t had a few choice words for a bad driver? But we don’t like combat. Nobody does. Only an irrational person, or a person too young to understand mortality, wants to go to war. When I was too young to understand, I left Decatur, where I grew up, and I went to the naval academy in Annapolis for the same reasons so many people do - a chance for a free and good education, to try to play football on a winning team. I didn’t really understand what I was getting into until I actually arrived in Vietnam. But I learned fast once I got there.

I do not consider myself a victim of my circumstances. I knew many men who fought with courage, and more than I wanted to who died with dignity. To the end of my own days, I will revere the sacrifice they made for this nation. I will never forget them. I will never forget that we served honorably there. But I will also never forget that we were not honorably served by our government at that time. It is that belief that guides me in the choices I make today and the advice I attempt to provide Secretary Powell and President Bush.

Just as my experience informs my choices today, our national experience in Vietnam helped define a new caution as a nation about when and in what circumstances we are prepared to go to war. But we must not let this sensible reluctance to fight drive us into wishful thinking. We cannot let our fear of the past stop us from defending our nation with force if that is our only recourse.

Certainly, we have a range of options for how to defend this nation. In fact, that is largely our job at the Department of State. Every day, we build positive relations with other countries and repair negative ones. Secretary Powell calls it the first line of offense. And when we do it well and the situation permits, we keep our nation at peace and in prosperity.

Of course, statecraft isn’t all about moving the ball forward with negotiations and treaties. Advancing our nation sometimes just means preserving the situation as it is. But we have to keep in mind that doing nothing is not always a good option. September 11th taught us that there can be a high cost to inaction.

As a nation, we have to face the very real possibility that force may be our only recourse where Iraq is concerned. We all fear war, for war is horrible. But I have far more fear about what will happen to this nation if we do not act decisively to protect our people and our interests.

Never again do I want to feel the way I did on September 11th, when thousands of our countrymen and women were slaughtered. And I had to ask myself then and every day since -- every single day -- if there wasn’t more I could have done to stop it from happening. In that sense, sitting in the Department of State for me was not so different from sitting in your living rooms for all of you. We all shared a sense of enraged helplessness on that day.

Today, Iraq is an immediate danger to our nation. This time, we cannot wait. We cannot wait for Saddam Hussein to take a devastating action or to transfer a weapon of mass destruction to someone else who will. After September 11th, it is simply no longer an option to sit back and contemplate an enemy -- one with a stated intent to harm us, a track record and the means, and just wait for him to strike in order to protect ourselves. Those who protest and heckle today -- and they should not be disdained for engaging in the great American tradition of asking questions and calling their government to account -- but that crowd of protestors would swell ten thousand times over. Everyone in this room would be on his or her feet asking, "Why? Why did you sit there and do nothing when you knew what could happen?"

And we do know what could happen. Look at Saddam Hussein’s treatment of his own population. As President Bush noted: "On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured. Ordinary people have been rounded up and jailed, beaten and burnt with cigarettes or electric shocks, executed or made to disappear."

It is not just the US Government telling the world this. It is the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. Now, take the ruler who does this to his own people with total impunity and consider this: The CIA estimates that Iraq probably has a few hundred metric tons of chemical weapons agents, for mustard gas, sarin, and other deadly concoctions. This is in addition to an extensive capacity to produce biological weapons, including anthrax and ricin, which is fatal within 24 to 36 hours of exposure.

As the President told us, Iraq is less than a decade away from acquiring a nuclear weapon -- less than a year, if it can obtain the right materials, which are not so hard to find in this post-Cold War world. And there is every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein’s hunger for such a weapon has continued unabated.

Consider that when he thought he might get away with it, Saddam Hussein has attacked his neighbors. And when he thought there would be no consequences, he has used chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people.

Consider that today, he has little to lose, and even less as the world debates his fate and he watches what little legitimacy he had left evaporate. As the President noted, Saddam Hussein could decide on any given day to use one of these weapons, or to provide one to a terrorist group or individual terrorists whom he has a long history of harboring and aiding.

This is a very dangerous man. This is a dangerous man who has failed to abide by any of his commitments to the international community, to the nations that defeated him in war, to his own people. To act against him is not preemption. It is redemption -- redemption of our peace and our safety, of stability in a lynchpin region of the world, of the future.

We have tried every means short of war. As the President told us, the world has tried inspecting his weapons facilities, and Saddam Hussein has misled and frustrated the inspectors and then finally barred them altogether. The world has tried economic sanctions, only to see Saddam Hussein earn billions of dollars from illegal oil sales. The world has tried limited military strikes to destroy his capability to build weapons of mass destruction, only to see them rebuilt while the regime denies they even exist.

The upshot is that for 11 years, the international community has sought to contain Saddam Hussein. For 11 years, we have tried to limit the damage he could inflict. For 11 years, we have in truth waged war by other means. And throughout that time, Saddam Hussein has constantly tested and correctly assessed that none of these measures has any real teeth, that he personally need not pay the price for any of it, that he need not give up any of his ambitions.

Instead, all Iraqis paid the price for the sanctions their leader earned, while Saddam Hussein built palaces, massive complexes of marble with miles of out buildings. The United States and Britain protected Shia in the South and Kurds in the north, while Saddam Hussein slaughtered his people and shot at our forces. The United Nations tried to find a way to supply the people of Iraq with food, medicine, and schoolbooks for their children, while Saddam Hussein spent the money that rightfully belongs to his people on missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

For 11 years, we have seen far too many resolutions and far too little resolve. For 11 years, we have tolerated an intolerable situation. And so to the people who ask, "Why now?" I say that we have already waited 11 years too long.

And so now, we have to look at Iraq with clear eyes, and so do all of the other countries in the community of nations. After all, it is not just Americans who are conflict averse and risk avoiding -- but no one can afford to be so at the expense of civilian lives and livelihoods. And so we have little choice but to change the calculus:

Iraq must disarm and do it now, or we will disarm Iraq. This is why President Bush is seeking a United Nations Security Council resolution, one that had real teeth and direct, and immediate consequences for intransigence. A resolution that is a last chance for a regime that must disarm or be destroyed. And we have to mean this. We have to be prepared to carry through on the threat because Saddam Hussein only responds to threats that carry force.

Regardless of how we defang this regime, with inspectors and destruction of weapons, or with precision-guided munitions and boots on the ground, this is fight that we will win. But it is also a fight that cannot be won solely on the battlefield. We also have to win in the aftermath.

In February of this year, Secretary Powell told Congress that - "We look forward to the day when a democratic, representative government at peace with its neighbors leads Iraq to rejoin the family of nations." We are doing more than looking forward to this day; we are planning for it. Because one way or another, the day will come when Saddam Hussein is gone, and a different Iraq can take shape. And it is the Iraqis themselves who will make this happen.

We need to let the people of Iraq regain control over their lives and rebuild their nation. This is not something the United States can or should do for the people of Iraq. It is not even something we can leverage alone. But it is something the Department of State is actively involved in today. We are working with free Iraqis through the Future of Iraq project and its 16 working groups, which are examining everything from public finance and accounts, to a transitional system of justice, to how to institute the principles of a more representative government and richer civil society.

This is a country that has much going for it -- in many ways, far more than post-Taliban Afghanistan. The oil wealth that concentrates power so illegitimately in the hands of tyrant can instead sustain the nation which also is rich in other resources, including a relatively educated populace and an active merchant class. But regardless of how we achieve regime change in Iraq, this revival of a people who have lived in the long shadow of repression for 30 years will be a massive and difficult undertaking, one that will require the support and resources of many nations if it is to succeed.

Secretary Powell and I, and indeed the President, are engaged in daily discussions with our counterparts all over the world in order to shape this concerted effort at building peace. Facing this risk to our future, and facing it in cooperation with the community of nations, it is not an option. It is a necessity.

As President Bush told us: "Failure to act would embolden other tyrants. It would allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources, and it would make blackmail a permanent feature of world events."

I think one of the most important lessons we all learned on September 11th is that we will as a people pull together when we are threatened. We refuse to live in fear. Today, we need to make sure that our future is not one of tyrants, terrorists and nuclear blackmail. And I have confidence that we will, as a nation, and as a member of the international community of nations, pull together to meet this challenge and build a better future.