Thank you all for coming and thank you to Curtis Mack who's been very patient, because he asked me a few years ago but it's very rare that I can get to Los Angeles. 

 I know that many people who deliver speeches generally try to open with a joke, and it has been troubling me because I don't really do things that lend themselves to jokes but I try to figure out what to say to lighten things up.  Then I was reading The New York Times on Monday and a joke fell into my lap.  But you see, it wasn't a very good joke, and nobody will laugh.  The New York Times, in its Review section on Sunday wrote an article about news in general and about international news and in the first line posited this fact: that the venerable Leslie Gelb, who's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, found Fox News a more reliable source of international news coverage than CNN — you are laughing, it's great — or other news networks.  Mr. Gelb said that she found Fox to give a “fairer and fuller picture of what's going on in the world.”  This was like a dagger through my heart, and a dagger through the collective heart of CNN, until we realized that this really was not very serious. You can say whatever you like about Fox, and there are many things to say about its rating success, about its punchy, scrappy style, about the fact that it claims to represent Bush's America, you can say all those things and comment about it, but when you try to say that Fox is a serious purveyor of international news, then you've stepped over the line.

 At the outset I would like to say, for the record, that CNN remains the heavyweight news champ of the world.  Those of us who've been reporting from around the world, my colleagues and I who have toiled, sweated, bled, died and even cried many, many times for 20 years in far and distant lands, will continue to provide a home for anybody in this country, and around the world, who is still interested in what is happening in our world.  I do not believe that enough foreign news or international news is provided to the American people, and for me that's something that I feel is not only wrong but ultimately dangerous.  If any of you have been driving on these beautiful highways you see huge billboards that are plastered up right now advertising Live From Baghdad.  This is an HBO film that will air [December 7] and it is the story of our producers who reported the first Gulf War back in 1991.  It's not a documentary it's a movie.  But it's had great reviews and it does something very, very great at this precise moment when it seems to be a model about where CNN is and what CNN does and what CNN stands for.  In this world of Hollywood, in this city of Hollywood, it should tell everybody that CNN is recognized for being the preeminent source of international news coverage and I hope you enjoy it.  I think it's going to be very good.  So this article, apart from irritating me, really provided me with the platform and more ammunition to continue what I sort of self-deprecatingly call “my missionary zeal” when it comes to talking up the value and the importance of international news coverage.

 I believe absolutely in the power of great journalism.  I believe great journalism can help make the world a better place.  It can make a difference.  There is an eminent judge whom I grew to know during the Balkan situation who eventually became one of the first chief prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.  She has said in a speech: “I believe there can be no justice, no human rights, no equality and no liberty without a good, fair and responsible press.” I believe that.  For years, in my speeches and interviews and in my work, I've tried to fight the good fight.  It's getting lonely, it's uphill, sometimes even Sisyphean, up it goes and then it falls back again.  But I believe that we have to continue this fight because what happens around the world is vitally, vitally important, not just so that people in this country know about what is going on around the world, but that they know that what happens around the world ultimately affects them in a very, very personal way. We know that especially after September 11.  After September 11 foreign news became fashionable again and we all, we foreign correspondents and people who labor in this field, grew hopeful that we'd be able to do some meaningful work again. Then it sort of trailed off, and it's been trailing off ever since.  We hear from our bosses about the advertisers, about the 18-24 year olds, about domestic affairs, all of those, of course, are important but not to the exclusion of proper and meaningful international news.  There's always an excuse about why we shouldn't be providing you with meaningful coverage from around the world and the biggest excuse, the one that drives me the maddest, is that our bosses say, that you, the American people, don't care.  Or worse — I hate to say this in polite company — that you're too stupid to understand, or care, or want to know.  I believe that to be an affront, to be an insult, and I've always tried to tell any industry, meeting or anything like that, that this does a great disservice to a great people and a great country such as the United States.

 I think Americans, from all that I know and all the letters and e-mails and phone calls and comments I get from people, are historically a compassionate people.  They care about what's happening about the world.  You're a moral people, you don't like to see injustices perpetrated around the world.  I believe from my own experience that people here in this country do respond when the stories we tell are told in a compelling way, in a relevant way, in an interesting way, and I think, as I've said, post-September 11 it's no longer an option.  Now people have to care.  People have to care about what's going on in the outside world. 

 I remember being horrified when I was reporting after September 11 at some of the basic questions coming from this country.  People were asking, “Who are these people? Why do they hate us? Who is Osama bin Laden?”  We've been reporting on Osama bin Laden, but obviously not enough and our reports were not getting enough air in this country.

 There was terrible story — terrible in that it's just scary — about a federal employee several months ago who reported one of the hijackers had come to her office and had talked about trying to get a loan and had been talking during this interview with this federal employee about Osama bin Laden, who he was and what his views were.  When asked why she didn't report this back then she said, “Osama bin Laden?  I wouldn’t have known Osama bin Laden from a character in Star Wars.'  This is very, very scary stuff.

 It's also no way for a great power like America and a great people like Americans to be serviced.  I really, really believe that we have a responsibility to do better.  I think the level of willful ignorance that our bosses are complicit in is wrong.  I think that we absolutely have to do whatever we can to make sure that this situation rights itself to some extent.  Roone Arledge, the great president and head of ABC News, died yesterday.  I came up much after he had had his magic way with ABC N.  This is the guy who gave us Nightline, this is the guy who gave us real, quality news-shows that today are not just successful in terms of news-shows, but also make money.  Roone Arledge showed that you can do good programming, good and vital and relevant news programming and be successful.  Don Hewitt, whom I happen to work for, which is a great privilege for me, on 60 Minutes has also shown that you can do great, great journalism including devoting a lot of time to international stories and events.  On 60 Minutes, you can do great journalism and great pieces and be a profitable news organization.  Last month a person of no less stature than Oprah Winfrey, the great leader of popular culture in this country, teamed up with CNN and had an hour on what she called “World 101.”  It was a whole hour devoted to telling her audience what she felt they needed to know about the world.  It was really an excellent, and, in my view, responsible thing to do, and her audience seemed genuinely pleased and surprised and in some cases shocked by the things that they were hearing, apparently for the very first time.  And again, here was somebody, not a news leader but a leader in our popular culture, who was reminding everyone that, like it or not, my profession has a duty and a mission to inform and educate as well as to entertain.

 I get a little nervous when I see the haste with which the news organizations are rushing after the 18-24-year old demographic because historically it's been shown that they're not very interested in news.  Furthermore, there was this scary poll that was released a couple of weeks ago by the National Geographic.  They had polled these 18-24-year olds and the minority of them, only 14 percent, could find Iraq on the map.  That's also scary.  What is being talked up in the country, for the last several months at least, if not Iraq?  Only 17 percent could find Afghanistan on a map.  That's pretty scary as well.  In the meantime, all those people who are over 24 who care about news are watching the programs and being dumbed-down so that, in my view, some people who talk to me anyway, say that they're being turned off.  Somehow we have to really combat this.  I would like to use that to now go into more of a foreign policy conversation about Afghanistan and Iraq.   

I have been working in Afghanistan for a long, long time.  I was there during the liberation of Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan last year and I went back to do some programs over the summer.  I'm not a politician, I'm not a diplomat, I'm a communicator, and I want to share with you some raw human intelligence that I've gathered in some of the important parts of the world in my recent trips. 

 First, why do they hate us?  This question primarily pertains to the Muslim world since terrorism in the name of Islam, a distorted Islam, is being waged against America and its allies and, actually, against the whole civilized world.  There is no way that I can answer that question because there is no rational way to justify or explain what the Osama bin Ladens of this world feel.  They hate.  That's their program.  They hate.  There's nothing more complicated than that.  Theirs is a nihilistic program in furtherance of an illegitimate end.  They don't have any kind of real philosophy.  Their philosophy is just to oppose the kinds of freedoms, the kinds of political principles and morals, that people in the United States, people in the West and other likeminded people in the world, happen to hold.  These people do not care about the Palestinians, or about the Iraqis, or about the other Muslims who suffer in this world.  It's about power and it's about a power struggle.  They are, of course, not only distorting their religion, but I believe they're in the process of destroying Islam if they're not very careful.  There is right now a very interesting and important internal struggle going on in the Islamic world. 

 Look at Iran, for instance.  In the last five years, since the majority of the Iranian people voted in a moderate, to an extent pro-Western, pro-democracy, pro-freedom, president, there has been a struggle between the majority of the people of Iran and the few hardliners who hold all the levers of power.  Right now there have been several weeks of demonstrations inside Tehran University trying to put that struggle across, and the jury is still out on who eventually is going to win.  There is a struggle going on in Islam and the people of the Osama bin Laden crowd are on one side and the rest of the moderate world in Islam is on the other side. 

 The problem, of course, is that there are not enough Muslim intellectuals, journalists, leaders, and moderate Islamic scholars who are willing or brave enough to get up and wrench the debate back from the hardliners who have hijacked that debate and who control that debate right now.  This is very, very sad. 

 You may have heard about the Arab news network, Al Jazeera.  It's doing a lot of good in the Islamic world because it's providing a much more lively platform for debate.  But still on that network there isn't enough serious debate about what Osama bin Laden is doing, or debate about, for instance, what the Palestinian suicide bombers are doing.  The difference between the Palestinians and the Osama bin Ladens of the world is that the Palestinians have a legitimate cause but right now are using illegitimate means.  Suicide bombing of innocent Israeli civilians, men, women and children is unjustified even though they have a legitimate end, a legitimate cause and a legitimate struggle.  Right now, somewhat encouragingly, there is also an internal debate inside the Palestinian body politic, inside not just the people on the streets but the leaders who are very belatedly coming to the notion that these suicide bombings are not only strategically wrong, but also morally wrong.   

There are Muslims, it has to be said, around the world who do not approve of and in fact dislike intensively U.S. policy towards the Muslim.  In many cases they are some views that are somewhat justified.  They ask, “Why does the United States preach democracy and freedom all around the world and not to us?  Not to us the Muslim powers of the world, the Arab countries.  Why does the Untied States support corrupt and authoritarian regimes all over the Islamic and Arab world?”  The answer, to a great extent, of course, is oil.  There are also Muslims in ever-increasing numbers who are driven to a state of fury by what they see on Al Jazeer and on other networks in their own world and in their own newspapers.  They are driven to a state of constant agitation by seeing the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces that are using American military [equipment], M16s, Apache helicopters etc.  As I say, this makes a difference in terms of what people think out there even though there, is no justification for what the Palestinians have done. 

 When we talk about what the Muslim world thinks about the United States — and there's a new poll that just came out by the Pew Research Center — it's much more nuanced and much less grim, in my view, than the impression we're being given — it's not just about hate, hate, hate.  It is about, I think, a love-hate relationship.  A Gallup poll last year which went for the first time across many Muslim nations, found that people in these countries highly valued and highly admired America's democracy, its principles of freedom, its technological power, its economic prowess and, yes, even its culture.  People all over the Islamic world listen to American music, and like American movies and sports.  Everywhere I go I see shirts with American slogans, whether it's basketball heroes or film stars or whatever.  America is very popular in many of these parts of the world, but there is a considerable resentment, that they think that America is not doing enough to share those values and to export those values to their part of the world. 

 Before these polls came out I used to base my view and my belief that this was the case on anecdotal evidence.  Such as long lines at American consulates all over the world, including the Islamic world — people wanted to come here to visit, to study, to learn, to see, to absorb — and also on all the things that people used to tell me.  These feelings that I had, this anecdotal evidence, is being backed up by some of these polls.  At the risk of sounding a little “pop psychology,” I believe that these people are winnable.  In other words, I believe there is a vast pool of people out there who can be won over with a little outreach, a little hugging. 

 I think that, whether you want to hear this or not, the style matters a lot.  Although the current swagger and the warlike demeanor of the current administration goes down very well here, and is necessary to galvanize this country to meet the challenges it faces, it goes down very badly out there.  It basically backfires, and this is in many parts of the world not just the Muslim world.  People are frightened. 

 I've just come back from a trip around the Islamic world and people just kept asking me, “Why does America hate us?  Why are they threatening to bomb us?  Why this, why that?” and they are very nervous and anxious about what they perceive to be an America-first-and-only foreign policy, which certainly talked up by the administration and is perceived as being aggressive and arrogant.  People, for better or for worse, say that they miss the previous administration.  Whatever people here might think of about the good or bad of the Clinton Administration, people out there saw the administration as sort of the all-embracing-hugger-in-chief.  He was perceived as caring enough to go visit, to listen to their stories, to feel their pain, to be inclusive, and this made a difference in terms of perceptions.  This may just be a matter of style, but right now style is something that matters as we get increasingly mired in what I feel to be a clash of civilizations.  I don't believe it's the U.S. at war with Islam I think it's radical Islam at war with the West.  That's what I believe.  I think that America's war against terrorism right now must be as much about winning hearts and minds as it is about bombing and getting rid of the bad guys.  I think the bad guys have to be gotten rid of.  They have to be dealt with.  But given the fact that I believe that there is a vast pool of people out there wanting to be included; I think that these hearts and minds have to be aggressively pursued.  I think that our future security depends on it, and that brings me to Afghanistan again.

 A year ago this time, I was in Afghanistan.  Kabul had been liberated a few weeks before and by the middle of December the whole country was a Taliban-free zone.  This was a good thing.  It did a great thing for the world, and America liberating that country did a great thing not just for the people of Afghanistan but all of us.  The Afghans were dancing in the streets.  A charismatic, pro-Western, moderate man by the name of Hamid Karzai, whom I got to interview first, was selected and then elected President of Afghanistan.  Women went back to work, girls and boys went back to school.  There are now something like 3 million girls and boys in school in Afghanistan where they had only predicted a few months ago that there would be 1.5 million.  So this is a success story.  Suddenly, after 20 years of festering anti-Americanism, after this country hosting, if you like, the global university of terrorism, there was a new consensus in Afghanistan.  People there were saying, “Enough of that.  We are now putting our faith in the United States, in a post-Taliban world.  We don't want to be isolationist any more.  We want to embrace, and hope to be embraced by, the rest of the world.” 

 The problem, of course, is that Afghanistan has not been entirely embraced.  There was a donor conference in January of last year in Tokyo where something like $5 billion was pledged over a period of five years.  This would be a lot of money if it was being delivered, but it isn't.  I'll give you an example of some recent post-conflict countries and the kind of aid they're getting.  Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda, Afghanistan.  Guess which one gets the least amount of aid?  Afghanistan — just $75 per person, per year, against about an average of $250 per person, per year, in the other countries.  My question is why?  Why after all those pledges, after all those promises, after that massive investment by the United States, why is Afghanistan being abandoned again? 

 It was President Bush's first experiment in regime change and it was successful.  President Bush evoked respect when he promised to rebuild that nation, but it hasn't happened and I want to know why not.  The U.S. promised never again to abandon Afghanistan nor let it become again a haven for anarchy and for terrorism, and again this administration leads the international community in refusing to deploy international peacekeepers around the country.  The international peacekeepers are only in Kabul and none of them are American.  The result is that a year later Al Qaeda is re-recruiting warlords; is back on the ascendancy.  American soldiers who are still hunting-down the remnants of Al Qaeda are getting caught up in fights and they're getting wounded. The latest fight happened just a few days ago. 

 President Hamid Karzai, let me mention again, pro-western, pro-American, moderate, wants to keep his country inside the American and civilized world's sphere of influence.  He begins every interview and every speech with a plea for money for highways.  This might sound quaint, but in Afghanistan the whole country is fractured.  The whole country!  So highways are not just about transfer, which is vitally needed it's about politically reconnecting the country and in so doing extending the authority of this pro-American, pro-Western president, Hamid Karzai, around the rest of the country.  He also needs to show his people that he has the promises and has the money that he's being promised in order to put people back to work, to show that he's delivering, to show that his government is delivering. 

 Instead, I was shocked when I returned to Afghanistan this summer and had a meeting as well as an interview with him and he said, “You know, Christiane, I came back from Tokyo last year I was so excited.  $5 billion!  Do you know what that means for a country as poor and devastated as Afghanistan?  That is a king's sum.  That is fantastic.  We can do so much with $5 billion.  I came back and I told my people 'this is great.  We are going to get out of this mess.  This is our chance.'  And now I have to go on the radio and have weekly chats with my people to lower their expectations.”   

This is a shame, this is truly, truly a shame.  America made a moral commitment and a moral promise to Afghanistan, not just a pledge to break the back of the Taliban-Al Qaeda axis, but also to rebuild that country.  Now, just to be straight, America pledged and delivered its share of the money.  That was something like $300 million, which in any event, is a drop in the ocean to this country.  But about 80 percent of that money went to emergency humanitarian needs; none of went to development aid, which is vitally, vitally necessary right now. 

 I have seen peacekeeping operations around the world, and they have worked, and they have made the world a better place, and they should have been implemented in Afghanistan because a few peacekeepers would have gone a long, long way.  These warlords were under retreat, they were scared, they were running, and a few tough Western and allied forces patrolling the countryside and patrolling those villages would have sent a message that we're here to stay, you don't have any room to operate and you will not be tolerated.  Instead, around the countryside, warlords are beginning to feel bold again, and this is a shame. 

 The Afghan people have confounded conventional wisdom.  Conventional wisdom used to be that Afghanistan wouldn't tolerate foreign occupiers — remember the British in the 19^th century, remember the Soviets in the 1980s — Afghanistan threw all those people out.  Afghanistan does not accept foreign occupiers who come to destroy its country, but they opened their arms to the American soldiers, and the Western troops, and the allied troops, that got rid of the Taliban, and they have been let down.  The answer from this administration, from the Secretary of Defense, from the National Security Advisor, when asked about peacekeepers is that “It's not about peacekeepers.  Afghanistan's security depends on the Afghans.”  With what?  No police force to speak about, no army to speak about, with what?  Yes, the Americans are trying to train a new army but it's taking much longer than expected.  It's very ,very, very difficult work and the time is now.  You need something to fill that gap.  You need to do something before this army is up and running and able to do that job, if it ever will be allowed or able to do that job. 

 I was the Clinton Administration's worst nightmare during Bosnia.  I refused to allow the West's appeasement of genocide in Bosnia to go unreported, and I hope to be this Administration's worst nightmare until they stop what I believe to be a disgraceful abandonment of a country that is of vital national security.  A vital national security.  This is not about touchy-feel-good humanitarianism.  This is about common sense, national security, this makes strategic and political common sense.

 This administration, indeed many U.S. administrations in modern times, have been allergic to the concept of nation-building.  For some reason, that phrase sends people running for cover.  The people of Afghanistan, unless their nation is rebuilt, will fall back to their old archaic ways.  The people there know that this is their last chance and they are begging to be given that chance in a real meaningful way.  Remember Osama bin Laden's diabolical plan was hatched, not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, in the camps around Kabul, Kandahar, Jallalabad, and all those places which have now become familiar to everybody here.

 Before coming to power Condoleezza Rice, who is the National Security Advisor now, contentiously said “The 82^nd Airbourne does not escort children to kindergarten.”  In other words, no nation-building for us, folks.  We just drop the bombs.  We do the war fighting.  But I wonder if Ms. Rice has ever been on the ground as I have, as many of my colleagues have, to see the excellent work that American forces do after the war has been fought and after it's been won.  It's the Army people who got out and built schools, dug wells, engaged in this kind of civilian support which has done a lot to win people over and which is vitally, vitally necessary.  So I believe this to be a real, real important platform of foreign policy, particularly at this time when I believe, as I've said, hearts and minds are just needing to be won out there.

 A prominent British general told me when I was talking about this nation building business, “In our world today, a vital component of war fighting is robust peace enforcement.  You cannot do one without the other today.  It's not about going in and dropping the bombs in a good cause — liberating these places, making them free, giving these people a chance — you can't just do that.  You have to, have to follow through.”  He said to me, “You Americans are so good at nation-building but you seem so embarrassed about it.”  He was talking about the American politicians who, for some reason just can't come to grips with the fact that nation-building is a vital part of what foreign policy is all about in today's world. 

 Some people ask me, “Why put all this burden on the United States?  Why is it just the U.S.?” and that's a good question.  It isn't just the United States but it's the United States that leads the rest of the world and, indeed, in Afghanistan many of the other countries are being cheapskates as well.  Watching what the U.S. does, feeling no political pressure, just forgetting about the problem and not following through.  The price of being the world's only superpower is that, like it or not, there's a world out there to be led. 

 In my view this all pertains 100 percent to Iraq.  If there is a war there, and if there is regime change there, what guarantee is there, based on the example that I've talked about, that things post-regime change will be any better?  What guarantee is there for the people of Iraq, for the people of the world, when they look at America?  Why should they embrace the idea that America is going to do another regime change, when they're nervous about what happens afterwards?  I think that that contemporary America seems to be more interested in contemporary American policy seems to be more interested in getting their military job done and not the vital nation-building work done. 

 Remember in the first Gulf War, the first President Bush, won, kicked Saddam out of Iraq, but then it was sort of like hope-for-the-best policy afterwards and we've been paying for that for the last 12 years.  I read an opinion piece the other day where two experts were saying that the world needs to get ready for the mother of all nation-building efforts in post-Saddam Iraq.

 I think that America can counter-punch.  It can win over these hearts and minds.  It can do a lot more to engender sympathy in many of these countries.  One of the key vehicles of that is development aid.  Foreign aid is a vital component of reaching out, not only to try to make these bases safer, better, but to build up and repair fractured societies and anarchic societies.  Americans believe that this country, that your country, spends something like 15 percent of its Gross National Product (GNP) on foreign development aid.  That's actually not true and, of course, they disapprove.  They think that's too much, but in any event it's not 15 percent.  America's polls say that they would approve between one and five percent of the GNP to be sent towards foreign aid.  Well, it's not even that.  It is, if I'm not mistaken, one-half of one percent that goes out to the rest of the world, and that is the least amount of any developed country, the least amount proportionately of any developed country.  I believe that goodwill can be spread far, far and wide if that changes just a few percentage points. 

 I have supported and covered and witnessed interventions all of the world in the last 12 years that have really made the world a better place from Bosnia to Kosovo.  In Somalia, even though it turned out badly, they actually ended the famine and have done a lot of good things, and I just wish that this country would be able to capitalize on all of that. 

 I'm going to end by returning to my opening remark, which was about foreign news coverage.  You might think that Fox News provides more comprehensive coverage than CNN on foreign affairs, but you never hear this debate on Fox News, nor will you hear about it in conservative political circles because it's not popular.  We do debate this kind of thing on CNN.  We go out there and we send our reporters and we try to bring this kind of information back. I would say that in today's climate it's increasingly difficult to do this kind of work and hold your head up to do it.  While I'm not going to bash Fox here I will say that I will respond to them when they bash us for telling and reporting it like it is.  I remember in the post-September 11 world, I was out in Pakistan, I was doing a live shoot with Paula Zahn on CNN, and she was asking me the “Why do they hate us?” question and I was being very nuanced.  I was trying to explain it as well and as competently as I could, making the point that you don't justify and you cannot rationalize what Osama bin Laden and his group do, but that there are other issues, as I've explained, that are legitimate gripes.  Well, The New York Post, which is owned by the same people as Fox actually wrote that I was “a war slut.”  They used that word — that phrase.  God knows what it means.  They explained how dare I [report] to this great country what people around the world are thinking.  They attacked me and they attacked people like me for being unpatriotic. 

 I believe it is unpatriotic and a dereliction of duty for us not to tell those stories, because those stories are vital, that information is vital.  As my career has evolved I've sort of deliberately steered myself toward these kinds of issues.  I do believe strongly that these points need to be made. 

 I was interviewing in connection with a different story a former British MP, and we were chitchatting and he said, “You know, I am, and I have always been, a conviction politician.”  He was one of these old Labour lefty kind of MPs and I thought “Oh, that's good, I guess I'm a conviction journalist.”  I'm actually convinced that we can make the world a better place.  That we can make a difference, that good journalism forums are vital pillars of civil society, that we have a duty, a duty, those of us who have chosen this profession, to do that.  I think that Ted Turner had this grand, grand vision at CNN, believed in all of this.  Well I'm proud to continue and work for this network, even though Ted is not running our news organization anymore, which I regret.  He was a great inspiration and it wasn't about politics, it was about his vision of the world and it was energizing to all of us who worked there and who labored in news in dark, cold dangerous parts of the world.  We knew that we were doing it for a cause and for a reason. 

 I'd like to end with words that another great American television and radio journalist Edward R. Morrow said, talking about television.  I'm sure you may have heard it many times but for me it's inspirational.  “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and, yes, it can inspire, but it can only do that to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.  Otherwise, it is merely lights and wires and a box.”

 Thank you very much.