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Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios, Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development

Democratic Opportunity and the Islamic World

Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
Washington, DC
April 22, 2005

The advance of democracy has been dramatic but not in any way smooth. It has come in fits and starts, usually accompanied by great political dislocation.

According to Freedom House, electoral democracies today represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 62.5 percent of the world's population. Two hundred and thirty years ago this July, there was one. This was when a colony under the sway of the world's greatest Empire revolted and declared its independence. It was born into a world of monarchies and despotisms and the future of its bold experiment was anything but assured. The Revolution from America spread to France and continental Europe and this set in motion the first great democratic wave of history.

The second such wave came with the end of the Second World War. It left in its wake rock-solid democracies on two continents, in Japan and Germany, the two countries that had most violently resisted its influences. The fate of democracy in the newly liberated countries in Africa and other parts of Asia was not so happy. Regimes there soon lapsed into dictatorships, seduced by authoritarian models that borrowed heavily from totalitarian ideologies of the West.

The third wave began to rise in the 1970's when Portugal cast aside military rule and authoritarian regimes in Greece and Spain passed into history. It then carried itself into Latin America. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the 20th century purged itself of its last great "totalitarian temptation" and one of history's most formidable obstacles blocking liberal democracy came down. The first totalitarian threat ended in a Berlin bunker. The second ended in that same city, with celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan stood two years before when he issued his challenge to Michael Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. He, more than anyone perhaps, sensed the nature of this democratic tide and where it was going. Post-Reagan, the wave swept over Eastern Europe; inundated Asia; and penetrated into Africa.

Today, we count as democracies the majority of the world's regimes. Tyrannies are now in a distinct minority, isolated islands of brutality where we find such historic anachronisms as Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jung Il. For the first time it has become possible to conceive of a world free from tyranny. President George W. Bush used the occasion of his Second Inaugural to announce this as the express goal of the foreign policy of the United States, the first modern democracy and now the world's strongest power.

Until recently, the one region that had proven itself immune to the democratic tide was the Middle East and North Africa. In January of this year, however, the world was witness to the first breach in the dike that was holding democracy in check. It happened in Palestine and Iraq - of all places - two countries at the turn of the new century that seemed most impervious to any democratic inroads. Elections there astonished the world.

In Iraq, the courageous men and women who risked themselves for the right to vote also earned the world's admiration. Their actions showed both the power and universality of democratic aspirations and gave the lie to the many skeptics in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East who saw democracy as an alien imposition on the Muslim world. We may be looking back at this moment as a truly transformative event, the first in a series of elections that open the way to a new future for the region.

In fact, the Palestinians go to the polls three more times this year: to elect municipal councils; a new legislative body; and new leadership for its chief political party, Fatah, previously a virtual "closed-shop" under Arafat's control. This month the Iraqi Assembly elected a Kurd President, a Sunni Speaker, and a Shiite Prime Minister, who will form Iraq's first popularly elected government since it was hijacked by the Baathists. It will later write an Iraqi constitution which will be put to vote in a national referendum, also to be followed by new elections.

The example of Iraq was the inspiration of a multiethnic uprising in Lebanon against the Syrian puppet regime. This has struck a further blow against one of the Middle East's most recalcitrant autocracies and opened space for authentic Lebanese voices to be heard in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Egypt will hold parliamentary elections and is pledged to making the contest for president more open and competitive. Municipal elections are taking place throughout Saudi Arabia, home to one of the region's most closed societies and absolutist governments. It should not be lost on us that these were the regimes from which the perpetrators of 9/11 hailed and it was from them that the pathologies of fanaticism spread. Elections are also scheduled in Yemen and Oman.

Many have pondered the democratic deficit in the region. Some concluded that Islam was the obstacle. This included notable scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington, who argued that liberal democracy was basically a Western growth. It could not be easily transplanted to foreign cultures and was probably least adaptable to Islamic soils. This argument was made, strangely, just as democracy was taking deeper root in Muslim societies throughout Asia and the Near East, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Pakistan, prior to the Musharraf coup.

The democratic deficit in the Arab world could more plausibly be traced to political as opposed to religious causes. Bluntly put, the fundamental problem isn't religion. It is autocratic governments, led in many instances by militantly secular figures. And it is a perverse kind of "social contract" that exists between these populist autocrats and their subjects that seems to be unraveling and giving democracy its historic opportunity.

The longevity of these autocracies and their recalcitrance to democracy can be attributed to a number of factors. The thought of the 18th century French philosopher Montesquieu might be resurrected to shed light on all this. In the Sprit of the Laws, he declared "fear" as the fundamental principle of such regimes. When Natan Sharansky analyzes "fear societies" in his important new book, The Case for Democracy, he probably does not know that he is following in the footsteps of this great French thinker - who the Founding Fathers respectfully referred to as the "celebrated Monetsquieu" and studied as an "oracle."

"Fear" in these societies is all-pervasive, operating on both rulers and ruled. The ruler who comes to power through usurpation and violence (including successors to such rulers) finds himself in an inherently tenuous and fearful position. The person we see preening himself in public and firing a shotgun over the head of assembled multitudes is the same person who is forced to sleep in a different bed every night because he is afraid of the dark. "Fear" is also why an enormous apparatus of repression - the Republican Guards or their equivalent - was a concomitant part of his rule. Indeed, it was the heart of his rule. It existed to search out and eliminate any rivals to power who may be tempted to follow the same path to power. And it existed to bring control to a society that, outside certain privileged circles and ties of family and clan, felt little allegiance to such a ruler.

The very success of this repression raises the costs of reducing it. As Larry Diamond has said, "autocrats do not willingly commit suicide." This causes resistance to any move toward authentic democracy because for many such rulers, it is literally a matter of life and death. Here lies the principle reason for a lack of democracy in this region. Among other things, regular, democratic elections and the legitimacy they confer is the only way to eliminate the oppressive fear that pervades these societies.

Those not coerced by fear are co-opted. The autocrat's control over political power creates a cadre of officials whose attachment to the regime is a "bread and butter" issue. An economy, parasitic upon a swollen government, creates a privileged class of a wholly different order. Among their numbers are the inordinately rich. These are sophisticated individuals who divide their time between their home capitals and the West and move easily among their worldly counterparts in other countries. They produce children, internationally educated, who feel little attachment to their home countries. The well-connected, in government and business, naturally resist political change that could jeopardize their interests.

Oil revenues in many instances swell the coffers of such states and keep the system going. "No Taxation without representation" was the battle cry of the democratic revolutionaries that founded this country. Bernard Lewis claims, not without a touch of irony, the truth of the converse: that there can be "no representation without taxation." Windfall oil revenues have spared Middle Eastern regimes from taxing their citizenry. As long as oil flows, the whole of the nation's needs can be met from the outside, as it were. This has short-circuited the development of democratic institutions and the need to engage the citizenry in some of the most critical deliberations of the affairs of state, among which is the generation and disbursement of public wealth.

It is typical to find the religious elements in these regimes subjected to both repression and co-optation. The dangerous are imprisoned. Or, they are exiled abroad, where hatreds fester and the more radical among them organize. Other elements are subsidized arms of the autocrat and are free to preach as long as they use their pulpits to scapegoat outsiders for all the problems these societies face. Dissemination of religiously inspired statist ideologies reinforces illiberal Islamists and crowd out any moderate alternatives.

The great masses of people have their minimal needs - food and electricity, for example - met through other such subsidies. Through control over the food distribution system, Saddam could even decide who would get fed and who would go hungry. Traditional ways of doing things must be scrupulously respected. This is not out of reverence for the past but so that the people are not aroused. What jumps to the eye are the opulent lifestyles of the few and the abject poverty of the many. Such regimes, characterized by rapaciousness at the top and lethargy at the bottom, are not too distant from Montesquieu's classic analysis of despotisms centuries earlier. A vibrant middle class, the solid foundation of democratic regimes and a moderating brake on extremist politics - as Aristotle argued so forcefully argued in the Politics - is conspicuously absent.

It is, at end, not so surprising that such societies have proved resistant to democratic forces. For where are we to look for reform? The courageous individuals who have taken up the banner have little space to maneuver among the elements of society we have just identified. Restrictive press laws limit the reach of their voices. And the more outspoken are intimidated by prison, an important prospect to weigh for the head of a family.

These are some of the reasons why democracy has made little headway in such regions. And this is why the success of the democratic experiment in Iraq and the sprouting of democracy elsewhere in the region is so critical. We stand at a critical juncture, a time of great promise and a time of great peril. If we were to look to history we would see that the birth of democracy is seldom an easy affair.

The political ferment we witness today in the region has been matched by an even longer standing intellectual ferment. It has arisen from within religious traditions, among religious scholars who seek to marry the tenets of Islam with the realities of the present century by a "reopening of the door of ijtihad," a reinterpreting of sacred dogma to steer a new course for Islam and Islamic Law. This is being forced by outside events, for sure. But Islam is also open to such an undertaking. Sunni Islam, for example, does not have an institutionalized Church, with a clergy under sacramental orders, and a single person who is the sole authority for the faith. Moreover, among the chief monotheistic religions, Islam is endowed with a number of features that are most congenial to modernity and modernization. The scholar Ernest Gellner mentions some of these: a rule-based ethic, individualism, an egalitarian aversion to mediation and hierarchy, as well as anything that smacks of superstition, among others.

These religious scholars are joined by other scholars who seek the renewal of these same societies through more political paths. The 2002 Arab Human Development Report is especially noteworthy in this regard. This was a collective undertaking of leading Arab intellectuals. It was not a lecturing from outsiders. And it forced the Arab world itself to look at its backwardness squarely and not to resist reforms that are necessary to turn the situation around.

The thinking that is being done by these individuals is courageous in more than one sense. How they harmonize the duties of religion with the requirements of democracy is a matter of great consequence for our times and it carries heavy responsibilities. American national security is involved in all this. So is the prospect for peace in this century and the renewal of Islamic culture. Under wholly different circumstances and in a totally different situation, we once again look to the thought of Muslim scholars to preserve civilization, as we did 1000 years ago. I am honored to be invited here today to talk to some of these scholars and thinkers.

Outreach must include the religious leaders within these countries as well as scholars from around the Muslim world. Some of the programs that our Bangladeshi USAID Mission initiated with Muslim leaders provide a great case study. Shortly after 9/11, the Mission organized small luncheons with traditional Islamic leaders to discuss the terrorist attack on the United States. These freewheeling lunch discussions were essential to establishing trust and goodwill and led to the Mission taking 14 Islamic leaders on a bus tour of USAID project sites.

This in turn prompted the Islamic Foundation there to request technical assistance from our Ambassador to Bangladesh to teach village imams about health care, HIV/AIDS, agriculture, economic growth, democracy and governance. Every year the Islamic Foundation operates five 45-day seminars and one 10-day refresher course for 3,500 different imams throughout the country. They reserved a day for USAID to speak on these general themes and one day for a bus tour of local project sites. Imams subsequently requested specific training in HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking awareness and prevention and have expressed interests in using madrassah lands for income-generating activities.

What I am suggesting here is also what Dr. Adam Seligman of Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs argued in a talk he gave last November at Kent Hill's invitation here at USAID. But we must bear in mind, Dr. Seligman emphasized, that American civic culture, based on New England congregationalism and the Constitutional arrangements that define religion's role in our society are simply not "exportable" to other countries.

Given the ferment throughout the Muslim world, I want to speak to you today in strategic terms about our approach to democracy in the Muslim world, and to highlight a few of our initiatives. I do want to preface my remarks, however, by saying that more than half our development aid goes to countries with a majority Muslim population. This Agency is acutely aware of what is at stake in bringing democracy and development to these countries both for the national security interests of this country as well as for peace in the world.

If democracy is to come to the Arab world, an Iraqi door is its likely point of entrance. Our commitment to the Iraqi people must continue as our first priority. We have to take advantage of the historic opportunity that Operation Iraqi Freedom opened by shoring up the democratic gains that we are witness to today. Much rides on the success of the new government. It provides the indispensable platform from which longer term and more ambitious development initiatives can be realized in Iraq.

USAID is working with the Government of Iraq and Iraqi officials to build capacity in key government ministries that will undertake the task of governance in the new regime. USAID and the U.S. Treasury were instrumental in launching the new currency there. The Agency will continue to invest in efforts to put Iraq's financial house in order and strengthen its banking system as it seeks to modernize state budgeting and establish more efficient as well as more transparent government processes. The economic isolation that existed under Saddam is ending and we must smooth the country's transition back into the global marketplace, so that it can take full advantage of the opportunities it offers. It is a task that will be considerably eased once oil production starts flowing again. This can generate locally a large proportion of the revenues, which - properly spent - can go a long way to meeting the needs of rehabilitation. It will also bring full autonomy to the country. And this will burnish the country's new democratic identity. It is, at end, essential to help rebuild an economy that was drained by Saddam's wars, and which he sought to replenish through plundering neighbors. The success of the new direction will go a long way in repudiating his past policies.

Reform of personnel systems is essential if we are to dismantle the system of nepotism that was geared for buying loyalty, not for the honest and efficient provision of services to the Iraqi people. The elaborate repressive machinery of the state is also being dismantled. This means building a credible judicial system that puts an end to the capricious cruelty of Saddam's despotism - [he had merchants' hands severed because they handled foreign currency] - while it guarantees the rights of citizenry by following a "due process of law." Law that reflects basic Muslim values is to be anticipated and welcomed under the new Constitution as representing the authentic voices of the Iraqi people that Baathist ideology suppressed. The "rule of law" must be extended to the operations of a police force which existed under Saddam to victimize the people, not to protect and serve them. This is all important to reducing the climate of fear that inhibits productive enterprise as it saps the human spirit.

USAID's efforts at such capacity-building today are a long way from our "Ministry in a Box" programs that immediately followed the military phase of Iraqi Freedom. These initiatives, innovative as they were, made the progress they could just by clearing offices of debris, setting up a desk with a chair, and reconnecting the telephone. Those who say that there has not been progress in Iraq, or that it has been too slow, do not know what we were facing. I do. I stood in the rubble.

If a new democratic ethos is to replace that of autocracy, it must be built from the ground up in Iraq and made part of the ordinary operations of Iraqi society. A key element of U.S. assistance has been to help Iraqis learn to make decisions at the grass roots level. Through its Community Action Program, the Agency works with residents of neighborhoods to identify, prioritize, and meet critical community needs while utilizing democratic processes. We have committed over $129 million to fund 2,844 community projects.

The program is designed to build in elements of accountability. Typically, Iraqi communities commit some 25% of total funding. This gives to local communities a sense of ownership, as it builds a sense of responsibility in local leaders. It has established over 670 community action groups which operate in 17 Iraqi governorates. These are the "little platoons" of democracy, to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke. They are also intended to be the proving grounds for future leaders who will assume responsibilities for governing at higher levels in the new Iraq. [We estimate that about one in five seats in the Transitional Assembly are occupied by individuals that came through the ranks of local councils. But this statistic is hard to pin down because, among other things, individual ran as part of party lists, rather than in their own right]. They join other new local councils, parent teacher associations, NGOs, and human rights organizations throughout the new Iraq that are part of our efforts to build capacity in civil society, all of which are giving people a voice in their own affairs and a direct say in how they are governed.

If democracy is to take root and Iraq is to develop, education must remain a top priority. USAID has awarded 627 grants worth more than $6 million that has gone into rehabilitating 2,405 schools. Girls have been encouraged to attend school again and this has pushed their registration up to 96% for primary schools last school year. USAID saw to it that 1.5 million secondary school students received book bags stuffed with pencils, crayons, pens, paper, and other supplies.

Before Saddam began his disastrous wars, Iraq had one of the best education systems in the Arab world. This was a highly educated country with a high literacy rate. It stands today at well below 40%. Early last year, USAID and UNESCO printed and distributed 8.7 million revised math and science textbooks to grades 1-12. And we were involved in de-Baathisizing other texts and curricula that have not been revised for over two decades. We have completed a major initiative that trained nearly 33,000 secondary school teachers and administrators, including 860 master trainers, nationwide.

Before Saddam, Higher Education in Iraq, especially the scientific and technological institutions, were up to international standards and staffed by high quality personnel. It is essential that these very learned and talented people be reconnected with the outside world and involved in the reconstruction of their country. Last year, we awarded five grants worth $20.7 million to create partnerships between 10 Iraqi universities and U.S. counterparts. More than 1,000 Iraqi faculty and students have been trained through other programs. We are helping rebuild Iraqi universities and are reequipping their facilities, sending students and professors to international conferences, and modernizing curricula.

Along with the public monuments to one man's megalomania, we are also dismantling the propaganda machinery that served him. A modern media is being put in place that will allow citizens to make responsible, informed choices and will serve to check public malfeasance and keep elected representatives accountable. To this end, we are working in Iraq to strengthen and diversify the media, train journalists, as well as to expand access to the internet and information technology. Voices long suppressed will then have the means to be heard and make their opinions known.

The elections in January that electrified the world were preceded by considerable spade work on the part of the United States Government and USAID. The US provided more than $40 million in technical assistance and material to help the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq conduct elections. In preparation for the elections, USAID supported several Iraqi civil society organizations in their efforts to encourage Iraqis of all backgrounds to go to the polls in the upcoming elections.

In early January, a non-partisan coalition of 76 civic organizations from across Iraq developed projects all over the country as part of media campaign to bolster the election. The projects included distribution of informational pamphlets on the elections, posters, and motivational appeals to get Iraqis out to vote, even in rural areas. The coalition also produced two TV spots, featuring a Sunni cleric and a Shia cleric, which targeted voters from their communities, encouraging them to take part in the elections. Prior to the elections, USAID NGO partners trained thousands of elections monitors. They in turn trained approximately 12,000 domestic monitors who were in place on election day.

For all the electioneering "spadework" the Agency did, I do not want to lose sight of the fact for one instance that we were tilling some pretty fertile democratic soil. At end, it was not our day. The day of "purple fingers" was a day for Iraqis and one for freedom. The Iraqis can use the experience of this January to structure and guide subsequent elections that are slated this year, in what will hopefully be more of a routine exercise.

It may not be known, even among officials in Washington, but we at USAID have been in the democracy business for a long time now. For the past 10 years USAID's Office of Democracy and Governance has programmed extensively in critical areas of governance, including rule of law, elections and political processes, civil society, and public administration, working in over 100 countries. In 2005, we have over 400 Democracy Officers worldwide working on these programs to promote freedom in Africa, Asia, Latin American and the Middle East.

Experience we have gathered in such places have informed our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which deserves special mention as a democratic milestone in the Muslim world. By almost any measurement, Afghanistan was one of the poorest places on the face of the earth, even before the Soviet incursion provoked decades of conflict. The conflict with the Soviets, and subsequent internal struggles culminating in the Taliban regime occupying almost all of the country, lasted twenty three years. This destruction of Afghanistan's infrastructure was matched by destruction of the nation's institutions. Afghanistan virtually ceased to exist as a nation-state, with no functioning army, police, border controls, civil service or viable ministries. Long-standing ethnic and regional tensions erupted into inter-communal violence, punctuated with widespread human rights violations and atrocities. More than six million Afghans fled to the relative safety of bordering counties, and the Taliban enforced medieval restrictions on those Afghan women who remained within the country.

Although the Taliban threatened to kill anyone who registered to vote, under the leadership of the Transitional Afghan government and the help of USAID, the United Nations, and other aid groups, over 10.5 million Afghans registered to vote for the first presidential elections in Afghan history. This was more than the original estimate of 9.8 million eligible voters. What's more, in a land where only three years earlier the Taliban barred women from even leaving their houses unless accompanied by a male relative, 41 percent of those who registered were women. The elections that brought President Hamid Karzai to power were preceded by a Constitutional Loya Jurga that USAID was also instrumental in organizing. The development progress that we are witness to today shows what can happen when there is a modicum of security under enlightened leadership invested with democratic legitimacy. Afghans have also voted with their feet, I might add, in the biggest voluntary repatriation of refugees in modern history. USAID's efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan are preparing us to play a larger role at the forefront of this Administration's foreign policy in spreading democracy throughout the world.

The period we are entering into is, of course, full of promise. It is also not without peril and I don't want to downplay this. It may very well be that the end of autocracy in the Middle East will put in place democracies with a distinctly anti-American taint. The people of the Middle East who will be empowered by democracy have been steeped in an anti-Americanism that will not magically evaporate. Expect them to vent long standing frustrations, to which American foreign policy in the past - admittedly - has contributed. The question arises: why trade the security of the status quo and alliances with autocratic governments friendly to the United States for the uncertainty of the democratic experiment? The question goes to the heart of this Administration's foreign policy and its forward based strategy to further democracy around the world.

The anti-Americanism we are talking about, as disconcerting and problematic as it is, is likely to be short-term. History shows, longer term, the power of shared democratic values to diffuse conflict and cement such like-minded countries together. The birth of new democracies in the Middle East can mean the birth of a wholly new relationship with the United States. The Palestine of Abbas is not the Palestine of Arafat and will not be received the same. The road we travel in the future will likely be less rocky because we are traveling it together with a shared perspective on certain fundamental things.

Those who would cling to the status quo in the Middle East seriously underestimate the "moderating" powers of democracy. Vali Nasr at the US Naval Postgraduate School puts things very well. While many see Muslim democracy as empowering radical politics, he sees it as the most effective means to counter it.

Muslim Democracy offers the Muslim world the promise of moderation. As Islamists find themselves facing - or caught up in - the Muslim Democratic dynamic, they find themselves increasingly facing the hard choice of changing or suffering marginalization.

Who can doubt that real elections in Iran would bring a precipitous end to the rule of the Mullahs? But for very few partisans, Iran has proven itself to be a negative model for the region - oppressive, narrow, and incompetent - holding no allure for Sistani and the Shias he leads in Iraq. The influence that the pro-Iran Moqtada el Sadr wields comes from the barrel of a gun. Elections dissipate it.

An effective political party needs to assemble a broad coalition of groups. An effective platform must cast its net widely. This pushes politics to the center, where extremists of any stripe hold little appeal. Rulers who emerge from democratic elections must govern competently or be dismissed in subsequent elections. At end, democratic governance in the Middle East may be the means by which "the rule of law" and a much needed "pragmatism" begins to reshape a politics that has been dominated by the "cult of personality" and ideological extremism. This is a people that has been exhausted by war and turmoil, victimized by oppression, and disillusioned by the false promises of the past. It needs democratic medicine not bromides or more of the same prescriptions.

For those who think they can find security in the status quo, I have two answers. Maintaining the status quo is impossible and it certainly would not, long-term, make the world more secure.

Autocracies can only be preserved as closed societies. A despotic state "is happiest when it can look upon itself as the only one in the world, when it is environed with deserts, and separated from those people whom they call barbarians," Montesquieu wrote in the Spirit of the Laws. Deserts are no longer a buffer. Nor are oceans, as Americans learned the morning of 9/11. The world we live in today is a shrinking one. It is impossible for any people to exist in isolation and close itself off from its quickening interdependence.

The Middle East sits on a demographic time bomb. It has the highest population growth rates in the world and is home to more than one quarter of the world's total unemployed youth aged 15 to 24. These youths search for richer lives in a world of wider opportunity - like youths everywhere, whether in Iran or in the Ukraine. They are acutely aware of the outside world and they feel and resent their own backwardness. We have to help democracies take root in the Muslim world to release the pressures that are building toward a social explosion. Those who would seek security in autocracy are buying some short lived calm, at best.

In World War I, America sent its soldiers off to Europe "to make the world safe for democracy." We are today coming to the realization that democracy is the only effective means to make the world we live in safe. And USAID is pledged to help non-democratic societies make the transition as its number one priority.

I want to make one final point that is very germane to all this. The anti-Americanism in this part of the world is palpable and must be acknowledged before it is effectively dealt with. For all its virulence, it is not a permanent condition, however, and it may well be that US support for autocrats in the region was one of the most important sources feeding it.

The role USAID plays in this regard has to be better appreciated. We are better equipped perhaps than any other force within the American government to treating this condition. We do this through our programs, in over 80 countries around the world where we bring some of the best of the American spirit to some of the most difficult and urgent challenges around the world. This was on display, most recently, in our response to the victims of the Tsunami. But deeds are not enough, I've come to realize. We have to tell our story and make what we do better known. This is the reason behind my new branding initiative at the Agency and the emphasis I am putting on public affairs in our missions.

Outreach is nowhere more important than the Muslim world. This is why I have had my Agency sponsor workshops, colloquia, and conferences involving Muslim scholars and public figures. This is why I always try to schedule meetings with locals, young people, and religious leaders in my frequent travels to the region. This is why I jumped at the chance to address you here today.

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