Thank you very much.  I was honored to be asked to be with you this evening.  I am a director of the World Affairs Council in Washington, and have been since its foundation, but to tell you the truth, since I spent 22 years as a Washington lawyer and since I spent some time out at the CIA in the Clinton administration, I'm actually pretty well honored to be invited into any polite company for any purpose whatsoever.

I think we have time for a short terrorist joke.  There aren't too many, but I think this one works.  Osama bin Laden steps out of his cave along the Afghan-Pakistani border and is spotted from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and is seen at CIA headquarters thousands of miles away at Langley.   A very happy CIA officer who's flying the Predator launches a hellfire missile and, BOOM! Osama floats up to the pearly gates.  There's no one there, but the gates are slightly ajar.  He looks in, sees no one, wanders around a bit, and then way off in the distance he sees a group of several dozen guys in funny clothes and wigs.  Not having anything else to do he wanders over towards them.  A big tall guy about his size peels off from the group, comes over and stops in front of him and says, “George Washington” and decks him.  Bin Laden goes down, he feels like his jaw is broken, he didn't know it was going to hurt up here.  As he shakes his head to clear it, a little short fellow comes over and looks down at him and says “Patrick Henry,” and kicks him in the groin.  He bends over in terrible pain and a third guy, another big tall guy with reddish hair tied back in a ribbon looks down at him and says “Tom Jefferson,” picks him up, spins him around and does a full body slam from about eight and a half feet.  Bin Laden feels like every bone in his body is broken and he's shaking his head trying to get away from the pain and then he sees these dozens of guys lining up and he says, “Allah, this is not what I was promised.”  From a distance a deep bass voice says, “I told you, you would spend eternity with 72 Virginians.”

Well, what is this war we are in?  Who is it with?  Why are we in it and how do we have to fight it here and abroad?  A few words on each of these subjects. 

First of all, I think we are essentially at war with three somewhat distinct but related groups, mainly from the Middle East, with one important exception.  First would be essentially the dictators of rogue states, particularly those that work on weapons of mass destructions and have ties with terrorist groups such as, of course, Iraq, was but in a real sense the still-ruling circles of Iran, Sudan, Syria, Libya and certainly North Korea, which is kind of an honorary outlying member of the Middle East.  These state rulers because of their connections with terrorism and with weapons of mass destruction pose an extraordinary challenge, since we can, I think, be confident that wars in the future will not begin the way wars have in the past, the way the Gulf War of 1991 began with tanks crossing borders, with flags flying.  They will began far more like September 11 and rulers governing rogue states that are willing to work with terrorists groups and have weapons of mass destruction are deservedly, I think, very much regarded as enemies of this country and of democracies in general. 

The second group are the Islamists from the Shiite side of the great divide within Islam, and when I use the word “Islamist” I mean a totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion.  I do not believe we should give the rulers in Tehran credit for being real Muslims.  They bear the same relationship to Islam that Torquemada and the Dominicans around him who ran the Spanish Inquisition in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries bore to Christianity.  They were totalitarian movements masquerading as a religion, and Khomeni and his heirs in Tehran are, I think, in a very parallel situation.  Now, in Iran the Mullahs who operate the instruments of power of the state are increasingly unpopular among the students, among the women, among the reformers and even among more and more of the Iranian Shiite clerics.  So their position may not be stable for a very long time, but they are very much an enemy of the West in general, the United States in particular, and have been since 1979 when they seized our hostages [and] in the early ’80s when their instrumentality, Hezbollah,  blew up our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut. 

The third group are the Islamists from the Sunni side of the division within Islam, these being preeminently Al-Qaeda but also those who support them and those who provide the ideological sustenance for them such as some shares of the Wahabi sect in Saudi Arabia. 

Now, these three groups are distinct to some extent.  They hate each other, they insult each other all the time, they kill each other from time to time, but they are somewhat like three Mafia families who hate each other, insult each other and kill each other from time to time but are perfectly capable of working together against the FBI just as these three groups are perfectly capable of working together against democracy and the West, in general.  They may not make a big show of it, they may keep their cooperation somewhat covert, but a few forged passports here, a little bit of anthrax there, a little bit of training here is, I think, very much something that we need to realize can and will occur, and those who suggest that the secular rulers, such as Bashar Assad in Syria, would not have anything to do with religious extremists or those who call themselves religious such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and so forth, are just wrong.  These three groups are perfectly capable of cooperating against us and do. 

If that's who we're at war with—why?  Why did they decide to come after us?  I think there are two reasons—an underlying one and a temporal one.  The underlying one was best stated to me by a D.C. cab driver about a year and a half ago.  Now, I spend a lot of time in taxis in the District of Colombia and I absolutely hate reading articles and public opinion polls which I consider to be intensely boring.  So instead of reading those article I talk to cab drivers.  It's a lot better finger, I think, on the pulse of America and in Washington, D.C. a better pulse of the world and it's much more interesting and a lot more fun.  So, a year ago February, after former President Clinton had given a speech in Georgetown University, I got into a taxi in D.C. and I saw a newspaper in the front seat was opened to the article and I recall that the article had said that the former president had suggested, not exactly claimed, but suggested that September 11 had been a payback for American slavery and the treatment of the American Indians.  I also saw that the cab driver was one of my favorite substitutes for public opinion polls—he was an older Black guy about my age wearing his Red Skins cap.  He could have been driving a cab in the District for a number of years.  So as I got in I said, “I see your paper there.  Did you read that article about President Clinton's speech?”  He said, “Oh, yeah.”  I said, “What did you think about it?”  He said, “These people don't hate us for what we've done wrong.  They hate us for what we do right.”  Now, I submit you cannot do better than that.  You, we, all of us, are not just hated but cordially loathed by these three sects of enemies for—fill in the blanks: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal or almost equal treatment of women, better than they do anyway, an open economy, all the rest.  And that is why this war will not end with an Al Qaeda Gorbachev.  It will not end with arms control agreements, and we should get this very clear right now.  This is a war to the death.  It is like the war against the Nazis.  There will be no quarter given by the other side and we need to get away from the idea that we believe there will be.  Some parts of the other side may deteriorate. 

If that's the underlying reason, what's the temporal reason?  Why now?   I would suggest that we have spent much of the last quarter of a century, and to some extent before that, but certainly since the late 1970s, convincing the people of the Middle East and many people throughout the world of two things: one is that we do not give a damn about the people of the Middle East, that we regard their countries as our filling station and that we are interested in getting cheap oil from them to sustain our way of life and we do not care about them.  And the second thing we have spent some time convincing them of is that we are a rich, spoiled, feckless country that won't fight—at least up until a year and a half ago.  Why would I say that?   In 1979 our hostages were seized in Tehran and what did we do?  We tied yellow ribbons around trees and launched an ineffective effort to rescue them.  In 1982-83 our embassy and our Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon and what did we do?  We left.  Through most of the 1980s various Hezbollah-connected and some other terrorist groups launch attacks on Americans and what do we do?  Occasionally we drop a bomb or two, as President Reagan did on Libya, but generally speaking we send the lawyers.  We send the prosecutors, we collect some small fry here and there and try them and convict them.  In 1991 we find ourselves, after a magnificent effort by the first Bush Administration to organize and win quickly and effectively the Gulf War, inside Iraq with half a million troops, having encouraged the Kurds and the Shiites to rebel against Saddam and they are succeeding in fifteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces when we stop and we sign a temporary cease fire that let's them keep their helicopters and fly them around.  We let them keep the Republic Guard intact and we stand there and watch while the Kurds and Shiites by the thousands are massacred.  Nothing could more clearly say to the people of the Middle East that, once the oil of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is secure, we do not give a damn about you.

Then in 1993 Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush.  President Clinton, after a couple of months of deliberations, fires two dozen cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in the middle of the night, thereby responding quite effectively, I suppose, to Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen but not all that effectively to Saddam Hussein.  So, in 1993 our Rangers are killed and our helicopters shot down in Mogadishu and what do we do?  We leave, the same thing we did in Beirut a decade before.  And throughout the rest of the '90s with various terrorist attacks, this time by Al Qaeda, we generally performed the way we did in the 1980s.  We lobbed in a few bombs and cruise missiles from time to time from afar and we sent the prosecutors.  So I would suggest that if you were any one of these three enemies—a rogue state dictator, an Islamist Shiite leader in Tehran or an Islamist Sunni, such as Al Qaeda leaders—at the end of the 20^th century and you were looking at the United States, you would pretty much draw the same conclusion about us that the Japanese did at the beginning of the 1940s: that we were a rich, spoiled, feckless country that would not fight.  Now the Japanese proved to be wrong about that after December 7 of 1941 and I think the three sets of enemies that we have are learning that they may have been wrong as well.  But you have to admit they had some reason for thinking what they did. 

If that's who we're at war with and why we're at war, how do we have to fight? There are two aspects of this—one at home, the other abroad.  Very briefly, here at home.  We have to keep two very difficult problems at the forefront of our [minds].  The first is that, as I said in the introduction, I very much believe we need to understand that what we are as a nation are creatures of Madison's Constitution and his Bill of Rights.  But we also have to fight effectively.  And we are now fighting in part here at home in a war in which there really are terrorist cells in places like Lakawana and visitors to the United States were taking training as aircraft pilots and flew those aircraft into buildings and killed thousands of Americans and foreign guests in the United States as well. 

So we have to do two things and they're both hard.  One is that we have to be effective in what we do against terrorism.  Sometimes this will require us to be other than politically correct, but we also have to remember the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Now, we went through a decade here in the ’90s and through much of the Cold War believing that liberty and security would never conflict.  We could have all of the liberties we wanted here at home—and we had about as free a society as human beings have ever had—and that as far as security was concerned that was something that people like the Navy and the CIA and so forth deal with overseas.  These would never conflict.  But when we have terrorists in Lakawana and people taking flight training who are legally in the country to take over aircrafts and kill thousands of us we have to do some things differently.  My own judgment is that the steps the administration has taken so far, with one or two exceptions, have been solidly within the realm of reason and what the Constitution permits because the Supreme Court has historically, in times of crisis and war, such as the Civil War or World War I or World War II, interpreted the powers of the

Executive Branch, particularly when it operates with Congressional statutory sanction, extremely broadly in terms of preserving security.  I think the risk is not the steps that the Justice Department has taken so far, although there are one or two of them I have some questions about.  I think the real risk is that we will not be effective in dealing with terrorism domestically and that we will have another terrorist attack, the country will get really scared and we'll do something ugly. 

We want to remember one thing about the single biggest infringement of civil liberties of Americans in the 20^th century: the incarceration of the Nisei, the Japanese Americans, in the camps in World War II.  Now these were concentration camps.  They were not German-style concentration camps.  They were the sort of concentration camps that the British used for the Boer War.  There weren't gas chambers and so forth, but they were essentially imprisoned and the three people who were probably most responsible for doing that were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then-Attorney General of California who was running for Governor in 1942, Earl Warren, and the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the decision in 1942 against the United States and upheld the constitutionality of the Nisei camps, Hugo Black.  Along with Martin Luther King, Jr. those are probably three of the four greatest names in liberalism and civil liberties in the 20^th century in the United States – Roosevelt, Warren and Black.  They're not normally known for setting up concentration camps and that's quite right, that's not what they did most of their lives, but they did it because the country was scared.  We do not want to be ineffective in fighting terror and find that we have some other terrorist attack along the lines of 9/11 and then find ourselves with people clamoring for us to do ugly things rather than sensible things in fighting terrorism.

The other thing we have to do domestically, besides balancing civil liberties and security, is to understand that this vast set of networks which we live with, the oil and gas pipelines, the electricity grid, the internet, financial transfers, food production and delivery, on and on, are an extraordinarily intricate set of interrelationships.  And as new physics and other theories, chaos theory, network theory and so forth, suggest to us, in complicated networks a small effect in one part can have hugely magnified effects in others.  The decision by the FAA to ignore flimsy cockpit doors in the 1990s had a huge effect on September 11.  So we need to realize that because these networks are so complicated and small effects can have cascading effects, as we all saw last Thursday, Friday and Saturday on the East Coast, we're going to have to undertake some very major fixes to these networks.  They can fail in two ways:  One is that they can fail in a sense malignantly.  They can fail because of unintended effects that have disastrous consequences, even though no one is planning them. 

For example, Europeans are not trying, by having very few children, to make the AIDS crisis worse in Africa, but they are, because by having very few children they have a very rapidly aging population.  In order to take care of older Europeans they're hiring most of the health care workers out of Africa and there are very few people, not nearly as many as they need, in Africa to take care of people with AIDS.  The United States is not trying to make Bangladesh sink beneath the waves by driving SUVs, but by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing global warming we may be, some decades out, helping Bangladesh sink beneath the waves.

So we have these interactive effects of these networks that no one intends to use to create trouble but nonetheless can operate that way.  These networks however, can also, as we saw on September 11 be used if one goes after their weak points, not malignantly, but maliciously and malevolently to create death and destruction.  Some of the things we do to fix these networks so that they don't have malignant effects will help keep them from being used, but sometimes they won't.  For example, the electricity grid.  We're going to have to start stockpiling transformers because if you add a tax on transformers to the sort of cascading problems that we saw last week in the East Coast you could really take down the electricity grid.  Well, stockpiling transformers is occasionally done by a few utilities in the United States, but often what they do is they'll park the spare transformer right next to the transformer that's being used.  Well, that's OK if all you have to worry about is malignant effects, naturally cascading problems, but if what you're worrying about is also terrorism, that means a terrorist just has to use one satchel charge to destroy two transformers.  If you are trying to keep toxic chemical spills from being a problem in the U.S. and all you're worried about is accidents then you do something like what we do now.  It’s required that chlorine, for example, be transferred from place to place on railroads because railroad accidents are quite rare and to make sure everybody knows what they're doing when they clean up any toxic chemical spill you write in big words on every side of every car “Chlorine.”  That's a great idea if you're worried only about accidents.  That's a “kick me sign” as far as terrorists are concerned. 

So we have to think through how we fix these networks and make them less vulnerable, both to malignant effects and to malevolent attack, and this is a hard problem that’s going to be expensive.  We're going to do a lot of things differently, in time, with the electricity grid and toxic chemicals, and a lot of other things, than what we're doing now.  So both the civil liberties security issue and the network issue are going to present serious problems not only to the Americans and others who are fighting terrorism in places like Iraq and Afghanistan but to everybody in this room who's going to have to deal with these domestic problems.

I close with a few words about how to fight this war abroad.  We have, since 1945 taken the world from 20 democracies to 121.  I'm Chairman of the Board of Freedom House and we put out a publication every year on the state of freedom in the world.  There are today 89 democracies that operate under the rule of law and another 32 that are troubled with corruption and the like, such as Russia or Indonesia, but that still have regular elections.  We've taken the world up more than 100 democracies during the Cold War years—an extraordinary achievement.  Sixty-two percent of the governments in the world and over 60 percent of the people in the world live in democracies of one kind or another.  And this spans most societies around the globe.  There are all sorts of unlikely democracies that you might not know abut if you don't spend time reading about these particular issues.  Mongolia and Mali for example, both of which are perfectly fine democracies but not wealthy countries, you don't always need to be rich to become a democracy—but economic freedom, political freedom and the rule of law tend to work together and reinforce one another.  As we've moved the world—and I don't mean “we, just the United States,” I mean the United States, Britain and our allies—as we've moved the world from 20 to 121 democracies, only three of those countries have been freed directly by American force of arms: South Korea in 1950, Grenada and Panama during the Reagan Administration. 

The American military was extremely important during the Cold War in protecting Europe with our allies, maintaining nuclear deterrence and containing the Soviet Union, but most of what we did to expand democracy since 1945 was done in all sorts of different ways by all sorts of people and institutions.  In Poland, for example, I would say the two most important actors were probably the Pope and the AFL-CIO and its work with Solidarity.  In the Philippines it was people power and Senator Richard Lugar and the advice he gave to the Reagan administration.  In Spain it was a brave King and the German Social Democrats working with the Spanish and Portuguese socialists t keep them away from moving towards communism.  All sorts of people and institutions have contributed substantially to this growth in democracy over the course of the years since 1945.  And this has been done and has succeeded in all sorts of core cultures and all sorts of regions of the world.  As we have done this, the smart money every time has said X can never run a democracy.  They said it about the Germans “We're going to keep the Germans through the Morganthau Plan just supplying raw materials to the rest of the world.”   But some other folks got in there and sure enough the Germans have figured out how to run a democracy.  By the way, being a democracy doesn't mean just holding elections.  It means having the institutions that will sustain that, and it also doesn't mean agreeing with the United States.  We're not running an empire here, we're helping free people, and one part of the freedom is the right to disagree with us.  The Germans figured it out.  A lot of people thought McArthur was crazy to give the Japanese a constitution, but the Japanese seem to have figured it out.  And then over the years all sorts of so-called experts have said, “Well, Asian culture is alien to democracy.  They didn't have a Renaissance or a Reformation or Enlightenment.  How can they understand it?”  A lot of these were self-serving Asian dictators who said the Asian culture is incompatible with democracy, but India, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Mongolia, Japan and Taiwan, all seem to have figured it out.  And then at some point in the ’70s people said, “Well, you know Catholic culture is not compatible with democracy.”  Look, Spain and Portugal were dictatorships and so was almost all of Latin America, and sure enough Catholics seemed to figure it out, too.  Now the Russians, who it was said would never be able to run a democracy, have figured out how to do it.  The majority of the world's Muslims live in democracies.  There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and the vast majority live in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Mali, Senegal and a number of democratic states.  Often not perfect democracies, but democracies nevertheless. 

There is a very special problem in the Arab world.  Of the 22 Arab states, set aside Iraq for right now, of the 21 remaining, there's not a single democracy.  A very brave group of Arab intellectuals a few months ago filed a report with the United Nations setting out some of the reasons why.  For example, of the more than 200 million Arabs in the Middle East over half of the women are kept illiterate.  How is one going to have a society in which children value education if women are intentionally kept illiterate?  The Arab world translates one-fifth as many books into Arabic every year as are translated into Greek—and Greece is a country of only 5 million people.  The Arab world, plus Iran, approximates the United States in population.  Outside oil and gas, it exports to the world less than Finland, another country of 5 million people. 

There are some very fundamental problems dealing, I think, in part with the influence of Saudi Arabia's Wahabi sect, and the way in which the Arab nations and countries and peoples were treated by victors in World War I, and dealing in part with our own lack of attention to democracy in that part of the world that we have regarded as our filling station for so many years.  But it is not hopeless.  It's merely difficult.  Europe as of 1914 was a continent largely of empires, and after that a continent of fascists and Nazis, and after that about two-thirds of the continent were communists.  It took two hot wars and one cold one to free Europe which is now effectively a continent of democracies. 

Democracy is the way to do disarmament.  The reason South Africa and Brazil and Argentina no longer have nuclear programs has nothing to do with United Nations agreements or inspectors or anything of the kind.  It has to do with the fact that those three countries became democracies and decided they didn't need nuclear weapons programs any more.  And democracies basically don't fight one another.  There are only one or two contrary examples in history.  They fight dictatorships, dictatorships fight one another, but democracies don't fight one another.  Instead, they argue about agricultural subsidies, which is a perfectly fine thing for democratic governments to do. 

So I believe that the only way we are going to bring about peace in the Middle East and with the rogue states that can sell fissionable materials to Mid-Eastern terrorists groups such as North Korea, is to change the face of the Middle East.  It will take us decades; it will be hard.  I don't think it will be as hard as Europe, but I think it will be hard.  As we do it, we will hear lots of people say to us, “You Americans.  You make us very nervous.”  We will hear this from some members of the Saudi royal family, we'll hear it from the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we'll hear it from many.  I think our response should be this: “We'd like to have you with us, but if you're not, we want you nervous.  We want you to understand that now for the fourth time in a hundred years this country is on the march and we're on the side of those whom you most fear—your own people.”

Thank you.