Remarks at Eisenhower National Security Conference

Well, thank you, Dr. Nolan, for what turned out to be a rather lavish introduction. It was almost extravagant enough to qualify as a eulogy. So that means that I am under some obligation right now to expire immediately. But you all will have no such luck, because I am going to give this speech anyway. But I will certainly do my best to keep you all from expiring by keeping my remarks relatively brief.

I am honored to be here. I have participated in the past in the Eisenhower series. This series has long provided a forum for some of this nation’s most gifted strategic thinkers to come together to challenge the orthodoxy of the day on the nexus between political and military strategy. Given that context, it comes as no surprise to me that General Schoomaker is one of the sponsors of this event. Whether he’s on the fields of battle or in the halls of bureaucracy, Peter Schoomaker has never met a challenge he couldn’t tackle and take down.

And speaking of challenges, I understand that I’m batting cleanup in this conference. After such heavy hitters as Don Rumsfeld and my friend, Joe Nye, it will be a challenge for me, I guess, just to get on base.

I think in such a gathering, Secretary Rumsfeld deserves a great deal of credit. His indefatigable commitment to the task of transformation to an information age military that is flexible, light, agile, hostile has helped set our country on the course to a more secure future. Certainly, in Iraq, we saw coalition forces which were linked together by webs of information, with air surveillance guiding ground troops and ground reconnaissance aiding air forces, all in real time. And that gave us a military operation that was efficient, it was responsive, and it was absolutely precise in its lethality.

Indeed, you might say that we have reached a remarkable junction in the history of our nation – certainly, in that nexus of political and military strategy – where we are able to wield our force at arms in a way that is consistent with our goals as a society. We have well-trained and highly-motivated troops with technologically sophisticated equipment. They can carry out any mission we might see as necessary to our interests, while greatly minimizing the destruction to civilian lives, property and infrastructure, and maximizing our ability to protect our own combat forces.

And yet, even with this most powerful military history has ever seen, we find that there are certain variables that don’t change much. And so today, it is still a soldier on the field of battle, seizing and holding ground – tenure on the land – who ultimately determines the outcome of a fight. It is still the inescapable suasion of a soldier with a bayonet standing on enemy territory that bends an enemy to our will, and Iraq has proven to us all just how important that point is.

Iraq has also underscored another durable truth: The power of a nation and all the suasion that power can command never has resided and never will reside solely in military might. After all, even that essential soldier who takes and holds ground can only stand there defending territory for so long, particularly when he or she comes from an all-volunteer force of a democratic nation.

And so, as the soldier must hold ground, as our forces and those of 31 other countries are doing right now in Iraq, we must also hold a different kind of ground. Because victory in Iraq won’t just be when our soldiers can hold their place without fear of attack or ambush, it will also be when the lights go on across the country, when clean water flows from all the taps. It will be when ordinary people can go about their business in the streets of Kirkuk, of Baghdad and Karbala. It will be when Iraq is governed by Iraqis, chosen freely and fairly by their countrymen and women.

This is a noble and worthy goal, one for which the United States has accepted responsibility, and one that will not be achieved on the quick. After all, democracy means more than holding a vote. It means constituting an entire system, a system of laws, a system that guarantees the rights of all peoples, and all the necessary institutions of civil society and of a healthy economy.

Now, today in Iraq, the United States and our partners have cleared the way for this sort of development to take place. And now we owe it to our men and women in uniform to use every tool we have to forge ahead, not just our military force, but also our political and our economic clout, and the energy and the optimism of the American character.

We will also need to act in concert with other countries. We have never sought any gain of territory from the conquest of Iraq. And so for the sake of our credibility in this world, for the resources we will need to sustain this operation in the time it will take to succeed, we absolutely have to work with other nations and work as a partner, not a patron.

Saddam Hussein was murderous with unquenchable extra-territorial ambitions. He killed many hundreds of thousands of his people in wars against his neighbors and wars against his domestic opponents, and in his attempts to redraw the map of Iraq, the demographic map of Iraq. His control of the world’s second largest reserves of oil not only kept him in place, giving him, in effect, a blank check for a military buildup of conventional and unconventional arms, it also gave him the ability to destabilize the region and threaten our vital interests out of all proportion to his real power.

All of the considerable pressure the international community brought to bear could not change that situation. Sanctions, however well-meant, never stopped Saddam Hussein from spending billions whenever he wanted to. And so, regardless of disagreements over the actions we were compelled to take in March, every other country in the international community knew that where Iraq was concerned, a day of reckoning was inevitable.

Iraq has been a closed society for more than a generation, and so it was difficult to know the true conditions under which people lived. Oh, we knew conditions were bad, but they were worse than we could have known. I am talking about the people Hussein tortured, butchered, dumped into mass graves. I am talking about his criminal neglect of physical infrastructure. Bechtel performed a comprehensive assessment of Iraq back in April, and they found roads and bridges and sewage treatment plants, oil production equipment and electric power stations had been left to rot for the better part of 20 years. And in many cases, those rotting structures were also bearing the scars of three successive wars. Ultimately, though, I am also talking about the terrible damage Saddam Hussein did to the psychological infrastructure of Iraqi society.

And so now it is time for the world to turn to the task of helping the people of Iraq, and we must succeed. It's not just as a matter of principle because we are somehow obligated to seeing this through, and not even because we want to alleviate the suffering of the people of Iraq, no matter how important that is. The sad truth is that there are suffering people all over the world, and the first obligation for any nation on that score is to its own people. We must succeed in securing Iraq now that we have saved it because it is a matter of our own national interests, because it is in the American character to finish the job and to finish it right, and because it is in the vital international interests to see that this nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very cradle of civilization, and a mainstay of the modern economy, will not only cease to be a threat to the region and the world, but will become a source of stability and success on today’s terms.

The United States and a coalition of 46 countries is working with determination to ensure that Iraq reaches that success and achieves stability. But I want to be clear that this is not an occupation in the sense that the world is most familiar with, a term that makes our friends and allies understandably wary. Certainly, France remembers all too well its own devastating and degrading experience in World War II. Indeed, it speaks to the unyielding spirit of France that the people of Paris liberated the city from within, even as the 2nd Armored Division of Free French led American troops into the city. But the Third Reich had no intention of returning Paris to the French, certainly not intact.

What we see today in Iraq is the opposite. It was Saddam Hussein who turned his own country into a wasteland, and it’s his remnant network of collaborators, along with their foreign recruits, who continue that dirty work today. These people offer their country nothing, just as the Taliban and its al-Qaida masters had nothing to offer to the people of Afghanistan, only a continued cycle of death, pillage, and destruction. And it's simply not an option to consign the 23 million-plus people of Iraq back to that fate, any more than it is an option in Afghanistan.

So Paris, in the end, was saved. Not just by the will of its inhabitants and allied forces at arms, but by ingenuity and by entrepreneurship, and by that massive investment in the future mentioned so many times in the course of your conference, the Marshall Plan. Indeed, President Bush invoked the Marshall Plan in his address to the United Nations. The vision of George Marshall, which met with skepticism at the time, was borne out. His intent was not just humanitarian, and it wasn’t just security, even though he meant to make sure we were not drawn into another war. It was also about economic self-interest. And indeed, today, the European Union is this nation’s largest single economic partner, accounting for some $376 billion in annual trade flows, and hundreds of billions more in investment.

And so Iraq is also about humanitarian relief, it's about security, and it's about self-interest. And here, too, our investment will be worth the cost. And I want to remind you all of a hard truth. The $20 billion that President Bush has requested for reconstruction costs may seem like a lot of money, but we have spent an even more considerable sum of money combating and containing Saddam Hussein over the last 13 years. At this point, we have to be prepared to expend our resources to achieve peace, not just to make war.

The vast majority of Iraqis want to redeem their country. And while they are understandably anxious about the timetable, they are on their way to reclaiming their sovereignty. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Jerry Bremer deserve a great deal of credit in my mind for the considerable progress we have seen to date, and for laying out the steps it will take to support the development of a true democracy. But in the end, only the people of Iraq can overcome the terrible legacy left to them by Saddam Hussein.

A new legacy will require good governance, economic recovery and a reconstituted civil society, and, of course, improved security. The Iraqi Governing Council has now been recognized as a legitimate interim representative of the people of Iraq by the Arab League, by OPEC, by the UN Security Council, and most recently by the United Nations General Assembly. The Council appointed 25 new ministers. And the tragic death yesterday of Minister Akila al-Hashemi has actually given her colleagues one more reason to carry on, one more reminder that they hold the future of Iraq in their hands. Of course, political developments won’t succeed without tandem economic developments. So today, an array of projects are underway, including repairs that will make the country’s infrastructure reliable for the first time in generations. Unfortunately, the repairs to the psychological infrastructure will be much more challenging. The economy has long been undermined by handouts, petty larcenies, and a significant black market. But Iraq has always had the natural and human resources it needed to feed the people and fuel the economy, and now Iraqis must find the willpower to do so. Our military forces have cleared the way, and now the Coalition Provisional Authority is helping constitute a healthy civil society that will be able to support a free market economy and a representative government, including better schools, local banks, hospitals, but also PTAs and local city councils, and paying work with reconstruction contracts.

Of course, for all of these fine efforts, security remains a challenge. And so we will continue to recruit and train Iraqi forces to police the streets and protect both peoples and facilities. And, indeed, the President's supplemental requests envisions an additional $5 billion for that task alone.

It's my view that the vast majority of Iraqis are hungry to resume the normal rhythm of life. And I believe that is the desire that in the end will win out. In fact, I suspect that one of our central challenges will continue to be patience. Again, democracy is not a quick fix. It is an interlocking system of citizens groups, institutions, and indeed businesses, and they take some time to form where they have not been allowed to flourish. If the coalition leaves the country too soon, all we have achieved to date, all of the sacrifice of our soldiers and the millions of Iraqis who want a better life, could be rapidly undone.

Now, I realize that I was asked to speak to you today about “National Power in its Entirety.” It's a rather modest subject, I must say. And it may seem that I have driven off on a tangent from that magisterial topic by focusing so much on Iraq. Indeed, I’m sure Iraq has been the predominant theme of this conference, and that is as it should be. It may well be that Iraq is a critical test case for a new century. Indeed, I believe that our actions today in Iraq will delineate what kind of world we want to see, and America’s place in it.

What it will take to succeed in Iraq – confident American leadership and a comprehensive effort, working in cooperation with many nations – is what it will take to meet the other great challenges of our day. This includes reconstructing Afghanistan and sustaining the great global coalition against terrorism, prevailing against the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and of Iran and bringing peace to Israel and to Palestine. But it also includes dealing adequately with such sweeping challenges as HIV/AIDS, where there is no military solution at all, or for that matter, seizing on the tremendous opportunities of our day for expanding trade and for expanding investment, for sharing in intellectual property, agricultural productivity, and information technology. It will all take a world system of partnerships.

For the United States, that will mean membership in multilateral organizations that are productive, including a revitalized and growing NATO, a WTO which serves the interests of all its members, and undertakings such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative. But it also means nurturing a network of relationships with our oldest allies in Europe and our newest friends around the world to include Russia and to include the People's Republic of China, which have increasingly acted as partners in a variety of common causes from trade and investment to the war on terrorism. Indeed, we expect that President Putin and President Bush will be able to extend the personal warmth between them into deeper relations between our countries in the course of their Camp David summit tonight and tomorrow.

Now, I believe we’re all familiar with the Pew poll on global attitudes, which tracked a strong current of anti-American sentiment in the world. But you shouldn't forget that it also tracked an equally strong current of admiration for American values. And so while people around the world instinctively may not care for the concentration of power in American hands, the current state of affairs is far more in any nation’s interest than the alternatives. The fact is that a return to a great superpower competition with annihilation hanging in the balance is not in anyone’s interests, nor is forcing on the world a model of state power based on repression and selective deprivation. Now, there are certainly steps, including more graceful cooperation in worthwhile multilateral efforts and a more finely-tuned public diplomacy, that we can take to allay some of the animosity and some of the built up anxiety.

But the essential truth is that the United States offers the world a flexible model of representative government, one that thrives on free minds and on free markets. It is a model based on values that everyone in the world wants and not enough people have. Indeed, millions of people around the world aspire to these values in spite of their own governments. So it is no surprise that some governments try to distract attention with convenient anti-Americanism.

It is that basic desire to live free that forms the basis of President Bush’s national security strategy, which is to prevail against terrorists, whether freelance or holding a state hostage, and to promote and support the development of democratic institutions across the Middle East and around the world.

And so it is in the world’s interests to see a strong America that succeeds, just as it is in the world’s interests to see success in Iraq. Not because other nations agree with every decision our government takes, but because the alternative would be an unacceptable failure – a victory for terror, a victory for chaos, and a victory for tyranny. It is in our interests to stand together with our partners and with the United Nations to help Iraq, and in so doing, to help ourselves to define our nation in a new century as an enduring force for prosperity in a peaceful world.

And so, at the end of the day, that American soldier standing there with tenure on the land has to stand for more than the power of a magnificent gun. The soldier also has to stand for the power of our ideals. It is the preeminence of these ideals which has given this nation such predominance at this junction of history. And it is that image of the young American standing resolute in the world that ultimately speaks most to the entirety of our national power.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon.