It was exactly a year ago today, near the end of my tenure as President, on my final trip overseas, that I went to Warwick University with Tony Blair to deliver a speech. As Mr Dimbleby said just a few moments ago, none of us at that time could have foreseen the exact difficulties of this time, but what many of us could see even then and what Prime Minister Blair and I talked about, was a larger battle brewing, one that made it clear to us, at least, that we could no longer delude ourselves that the harsh realities a world away are without real consequence for our own people.

On that day a year ago, I said "we have seen how abject poverty accelerates conflict, how it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic and religious hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the economic and social order on which our future depends". The world has now witnessed a tragic, graphic illustration of that new reality, one that, as Mr Dimbleby implied, has made a lot of people rethink their rosy projections for this new century. I come here to tell you that on balance, I remain quite optimistic. I am absolutely confident that we have the knowledge and the means to make the 21^st Century the most peaceful, prosperous, interesting time in all human history. The question is whether we have the wisdom and the will.

The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre believe they were attacking symbols of corrupt power and materialism. My family and I have a different view of that, I was Commander-in-Chief of the people who worked at the Pentagon. My wife represents the people of New York in the Senate, I knew people who were on those airplanes. My daughter was in lower Manhattan. I met one of her friends who lost her fiancé. I talked to victims who lost their loved ones who were Jews and Christians and Hindus and Muslims, who came from every continent, including over 250 from the United Kingdom. I talked to children in schools who lost their school buildings on September 11^th in lower Manhattan, whose parents come from over eighty different national racial and ethnic groups. To me, all these victims represent the world I worked very hard for eight years to build, a world of expanding freedom, opportunity and citizen responsibility, a world of growth in diversity and in the bonds of community. The terrorists who killed all these people, they thought they had the truth and because they had the whole truth, anyone who didn't share it, was a legitimate target. They thought that the differences they have with us, political and religious, were all that mattered and served to make all their targets less than human. Most of us believe that our differences are important and make our lives interesting but that our common humanity matters more. The clash between these two views over this simple question more than any other single issue, will define the shape and the soul of this new century.

I think victory for our point of view depends upon four things. First we have to win the fight we're in, in Afghanistan and against these terrorist networks that threaten us today. Second, we in the wealthy countries have to spread the benefits of the 21^st Century world and reduce the risks so we can make more partners and fewer terrorists in the future. Third, the poor countries themselves must make some internal changes so that progress for their own people becomes more possible. And finally, all of us will have to develop a truly global consciousness about what our responsibilities to each other are and what our relationships are to be. Let me take each of these issues quickly in turn.

First, terror. The deliberate killing of non-combatants has a very long history. No region of the world has been spared it and very few people have clean hands. In 1095, Pope Urban II urged the Christian soldiers to embark on the first crusade to capture Jerusalem for Christ. Well, they did it, and the very first thing they did was to burn a synagogue with three hundred Jews, they then proceeded to murder every Muslim woman and child on the Temple Mount in a travesty that is still being discussed today in the Middle East. Down through the millennium, innocents continued to die, more in the 20^th Century than in any previous period. In my own country, we've come a very, very, long way since the days when African slaves and native Americans could be terrorised or killed with impunity, but still we have the occasional act of brutality or even death because of someone's race or religion or sexual orientation. This has a long history.

Second, no terrorist campaign apart from a conventional military strategy has ever succeeded. Indeed the purpose of terrorism is not military victory, it is to terrorise, to change your behaviour if you're the victim, by making you afraid of today, afraid of tomorrow, and in diverse societies like ours, afraid of each other. Therefore, by definition, a terror campaign cannot succeed unless we become its accomplices and out of fear, give in.

The third point I want to make is that what makes this terror at the moment particularly frightening, I think first is the combination of universal vulnerability and powerful weapons of destruction. Both those airplanes on September 11^th, the anthrax scare and all the other speculation that all of you have seen in the days since. Now, in any new area of conflict, offensive action always prevails in the beginning. Ever since the first person walked out of a cave millennia ago with a club in his hand, and began beating people into submission, offensive action prevails.

Then after a time, someone figured out, well I could put two sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and I would have a shield and the club wouldn't work on me any more.

All the way through to the present day, that has been the history of combat - first the club, then the shield; first the offence, then defence; that's why civilisation has survived all this time even in the nuclear age. So it is frightening now because we are in the gap, and the more dangerous the weapons, the more important it is to close quickly the gap between offensive action and the construction of an effective defence. We have not quite closed the gap and it's especially frightening for young people who didn't even know about the Cold War. When my daughter's generation started thinking about politics, the Cold War was over, nobody talked to them about Vietnam. They didn't grow up on memories of Korea and World War II or like my generation, having drills at school where we'd go to a bomb shelter to be prepared when the Soviets dropped bombs on us, in the fond illusion that we could actually survive it.

So we have to be sensitive to the fact that there are objective reasons for people to be concerned, and we have to work very hard to close the gap. The modern world has been virtually awash in terror: since 1995 there have been twenty one hundred terrorist attacks. Before September 11^th, fewer than twenty had occurred within the United States and only Oklahoma City had claimed a significant number of lives, though we've been dealing with this since the early 80's when over 240 of our Marines were killed by a suicide attack in Beirut.

In the years in which I served as President, we worked very hard to prevent a day like September 11^th ever happening. Far more terrorist attacks were thwarted at home and around the world than succeeded, large numbers of terrorists who did commit crimes were brought to justice. We strengthened our defences in chemical and biological areas, we spent more money to protect the nuclear stocks in the former Soviet Union, we dramatically increased our terrorist budgets, we trained several response teams in our largest cities to deal with outbreaks of bio-terrorism. Good people had been working on this a long time but we haven't completely closed the gap.

We still have much more to do to know that all of our transportation, our water supplies, and our computer networks are secure. We have more to do to know we have done everything we can to break into terrorist money networks which keep them going. We have to upgrade and integrate our own information systems so we can keep up with potential terrorists and we have to do more to protect the still massive stocks in the world of chemical, biological and nuclear materials which could become terrorist weapons.

But the larger point holds. In terror's long history, it has never succeeded and it won't this time. The war in Afghanistan will be won shortly, the al-Qaeda network will be broken up, our defences at home will improve. I can't say there won't be more terrorist attacks, there probably will be, but I can say for sure it won't prevail unless we decide to give it permission and I do not believe we are about to make that decision.

Now that brings me to the second point. We're gonna win this fight - then what? The reason September 11^th happened, and it was shocking to Americans, because it happened on our soil, is that we have built a world where we tore down barriers, collapsed distances and spread information. And the UK and America have benefited richly - look at how our economies have performed, look at how our societies have diversified, look at the advances we have made in technology and science. This new world has been good to us, but you can't gain the benefits of a world without walls without being more vulnerable. September 11^th was the dark side of this new age of global interdependence. If you don't want to put those walls back up and I don't think you do, and we probably couldn't if we tried. And you watch, if you look at some of the recent elections, we're gonna see some people who try to do that. And if you don't want to live with barbed wire around your children and grandchildren for the next hundred years, then it's not enough to defeat the terrorist. We have to make a world where there are far fewer terrorists, where there are fewer potential terrorists and more partners. And that responsibility falls primarily upon the wealthy nations, to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens.

Very briefly, what are the main benefits of the modern world? The global economy; it's lifted more people out of poverty in the last twenty years than at any time in history. It's been great for Europe and the United States, in the last few years I was President. It led to huge declines in poverty even as more people were getting rich.

Second, the information technology revolution: when I became President in 1993, there were only fifty sites on the worldwide web - unbelievable - fifty. When I left office, the number was three hundred and fifty million and rising. Even before the anthrax scare, there were thirty times as many messages delivered by email as by the postal service in the United States.

Third, the advances in science. Scientists from the UK and the United States and other countries finished the sequencing of the human genome in a project funded largely with government funds during the time I was President. It was thrilling to me. We've already identified the major genetic variances that predict breast cancer, we're very close on Alzheimer's and AIDS and Parkinson's. We're developing diagnostic tools using something called nano-technology, super-microtechnology that will enable us to identify tumours when they are just a few cells in size, raising the prospect that we will be able to cure all cancers. Researchers are working on digital chips to replicate sophisticated nerve movements in spines, raising the prospect that they will work for damaged spinal cords the way pacemakers do for hearts, and people long paralysed will be able to stand up and walk. There's no question that quite soon the women in this audience who are in their childbearing years will be able to bring children home from the hospital with little gene cards and life expectancies in excess of ninety years.

And finally, the great blessing of the global age is the explosion of democracy and diversity within democracy. You can argue that those changes make all these other good things possible. This is the first time in history when more people live under governments of their own choosing than live under dictatorships. It has never happened before.

But what are the burdens of the 21^st Century? They are also formidable. Global poverty - half the people on earth are not part of that new economy I talked about. Think about this when you go home tonight. Half the people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A billion people, less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry every night and a billion and a half people - one quarter of the people on earth - never get a clean glass of water. One woman dies every minute in childbirth. So you could say "don't tell me about the global economy, half the people aren't part of it, what kind of economy leaves half the people behind?".

Second big problem, the global environment. The oceans that provide most of our oxygen are deteriorating rapidly. There's a huge water shortage. I already said a quarter of the people never get any. It could change everything about how we grow food and where we live.

And finally global warming; if the climate warms for the next fifty years at the rate of the last ten, we'll lose whole island nations in the Pacific that will be flooded by the rising water table as the South Pole and the North Pole get smaller. We will lose the Everglades in America that I worked so hard to save, we will lose fifty feet of Manhattan island - prime real estate - gone. But more to the point there will be millions of food refugees created, more terror, more destabilisation

But you could argue that long before we have to worry about global warming, we will be consumed by the rise of global epidemics accelerated by the breakdown of public health systems across the globe. This year, one in four of all the people on earth who die, will die of AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to diarrhoea. Most of them, little kids that never get any clean water. If you just take AIDS alone, we have forty million cases, that is 8,200 people a day dying. Thirteen million orphans. We're projected to have a hundred million AIDS cases by 2005. If that happens, it will be the biggest epidemic since the plague killed a quarter of Europe in the 14^th Century.

And it will destabilise countries and a whole lot of young people around the world will say "well, I'm HIV positive, I've got a year or two to live, why shouldn't I go out and shoot up a bunch of other people?". It'll look like one of those Mel Gibson "Road Warrior" movies in a lot of countries if we have a hundred million AIDS cases. And lest you think it's an African problem, the fastest growing rates of AIDS are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's backdoor. The second fastest growing rates of AIDS are in the Caribbean on America's front door. My wife represents a million people in New York state from the Dominican Republic alone. The third fastest growing rates of AIDS and the largest number of cases outside South Africa are in India, the world's biggest democracy. And China just admitted they have twice as many cases as they thought: they had a 67% increase last year, and only 4% of their adults know how AIDS is contracted and spread.

And finally, one of the big burdens of the modern world is high tech terrorism - and a lot of people knew it before September 11^th. The marriage of modern weapons to ancient hatreds: Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Balkans, East Timor, the Middle East or - until, God bless them, the people of my ancestors, the Irish, did the right thing - Northern Ireland. Don't you think it's interesting that in the most modern of ages, the biggest problem is the oldest problem of human society - the fear of the other. And how quickly fear leads to distrust, to hatred, to dehumanisation, to death.

So we now live in a world without walls that we have worked hard to make. We have benefits, we have burdens, we have to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens. Very briefly, let me mention some specifics. First we have to reduce global poverty and increase the economic empowerment of poor people. We know how to do this and it doesn't cost that much money. Last year we had this phenomenal global effort to reduce the debt of the poorest countries in the world, with everybody from the Pope to Bono to Jesse Helms for it. Usually when everybody's for something, there's something wrong with it; in this case there wasn't. You can only get this debt relief if you put the money into education, healthcare or development. The results have been stunning. Just give you one example: Uganda took their debt relief savings and in one year doubled primary school enrolment and cut class size. We ought to do more of that.

America funded, when I was President, two million micro-enterprise loans in poor villages around the world, I've been to African villages where the local village treasurer would show me his pencilled notes to prove that he had taken all the money that he thought I had personally sent to him and loaned it out in an efficient way to create a market economy in his village. We should do more of that.

The great Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has told us something we should have recognise a long time ago, which is that poor people in the world already have five trillion dollars in assets in their homes and businesses but they're worthless to them except to live in or use, because they can't be collateral for loans. Why? Because they're outside the legal systems in their country. Many of them live in shacks with no addresses, no title, no access to a court that would validate the title. Many of them run businesses that would literally take more than a year to legalise. I've seen the map on Cairo, I tell you, if you went to Cairo tomorrow and opened a bakery and handled it in the normal fashion, it would take you over five hundred days to complete all the government paperwork to legalise your bakery.

So de Soto is going through the works trying to rationalise the business laws and rules and make it cheaper for people to have legal businesses than to pay the taxman to look the other way. And then trying to organise the property system so people can legalise their homes so poor people can get credit, because they have collateral, the key in a market economy, both personal advance and national economic growth. We gave him a little money when I was President, we ought to do more of that.

We in the rich countries ought to open our markets to poor countries. Last year, in my last year as President, we opened our markets more to Africa, to Vietnam, to Jordan, to the Caribbean. In less than a year we increased our purchases from some African countries by a 1000%. It didn't hurt the American economy, but it sure helped theirs. The same argument goes for education. In a poor country - and AIDS, keep in mind, is largely a poverty disease - in a poor country, one year of education is worth about a 10% increase in income. There are a hundred million kids who never go to school. Part of our problem in Afghanistan and in the Muslim world is all these kids who couldn't go to public schools so they went to madrassas where they were indoctrinated instead of educated, not because their parents were radical: their parents couldn't afford to send them to school. Now, we could send all these kids to school. Two examples: Brazil is the only poor country in the world that has 97% of its kids at school. You know how - they pay mothers - not fathers - mothers, in the poorest 30% of the families, if they send their kids to school, every month, up to forty-five dollars a month. It increases the family income up to 30%, 97% going to school. Last year I got three hundred million dollars to provide a nutritious meal to children in school but only if they would come to school to get it. You know how many people you can feed all year long in poor countries for three hundred million dollars? Over six million. And, you ought to see where we've done this, enrolments are exploding, people are coming in. We ought to send those kids to school.

The same argument applies to healthcare. Kofi Annan just won the Nobel Peace Prize - richly deserved - for promoting peace. He knows if we have a hundred million AIDS cases, we'll have more war, and he asked us for ten billion dollars to fight AIDS, TB, malaria, and other infectious diseases. America's share would be a little over two billion dollars, Britain's share would be a little under a half a billion dollars. We ought to give it to him.

Look, we can turn this AIDS thing around. It, to me, is the most frustrating of all problems. We're gonna have medicine because of the South African drug case being settled. Uganda cut the AIDS death rate in half in five years with no medicine. Brazil cut it in half in three years with prevention and medicine. I have been in health clinics all over the world, I've seen kids in remote African villages doing plays to talk about AIDS. But AIDS has been around twenty years. Last year I talked to world leaders who were friends of mine who told me they really couldn't talk about AIDS because after all, there's all this cultural resistance. How many people have to die before your cultural resistance melts? So we've got to pay for it.

Now you can say that the same argument applies to global warming except it's the only area we'll actually make money out of. There is a trillion dollar market today in alternate energy sources and presently available energy conservation technologies that will create jobs in Europe, in America, in the developing world - and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We're being hurt by denial there.

Now, the other stuff will cost money. It will cost money but I can tell you this, it's a lot cheaper than going to war. We will spend far more to pick up the pieces of destroyed lands and shattered lives if we do not do these things. We will spend much more. We're spending - America - about a billion dollars a month in Afghanistan, that's as cheap as a war gets. We will never fight a conflict for less than a billion a month. For twelve billion dollars a year, we can pay America's share of all those initiatives I just mentioned and have money left over. So I urge you to think about that.

The next point I want to make very briefly is that we can do all these things and there are some countries in which it will make no difference. There are changes that poor countries have to make within, that make progress possible. For example, it's no accident that most of these terrorists come from countries that aren't democracies. If you never get to take responsibility for yourself, and you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, then countries are like people, you're kept in sort of a state of permanent immaturity where it's quite easy to convince you that your distress is caused by someone else's success.

It's no accident that Jordan is the most stable country in the Middle East. Ten years ago, King Hussein basically made a social compact with all elements of society including fundamentalist Muslims and he said "here are the powers I will give up, here are the powers that Parliament will get, anybody can run, anybody can serve, but here's what you cannot do to destroy the fundamental character of our society", and it has worked. So here's a country that's majority Palestinian, quite poor, quite young, and in a dicey position geographically, still chugging along partly because the people have some way of taking responsibility for themselves.

Same thing is true in Iran: the government's very anti-Western, but the people aren't, in part because they have real elections and real votes, and the only time that real democracy is thwarted is when their own people do it, so they don't blame us. So we should be advancing democracy and human rights, and once a country makes a decision to be more open and free, we should help them be more successful. Elections are only part of the job.

And finally we have to be in this debate in the Muslim world. I think we have demonstrated that America's not the enemy of Islam. I was the first President ever to recognise the feast of Eid al-Fitr every single year at the end of Ramadan, to bring in large numbers of Muslims to consult in the White House. One of the best things President Bush has done in this whole mess is to go almost immediately to a mosque and meet with Muslim leaders after September 11^th and then to break the fast of Ramadan in the White House with a meal, to illustrate that we have six million Muslims in America who are pursuing their faith and doing well.

But most Muslims in the rest of the world don't know it. There are some other things they don't know. They don't know five hundred Muslims died on September 11^th, a direct violation of the Koran and Sharia law, to deliberately kill other Muslims. They do not know that the last time the United Kingdom and America used military authority was to protect the lives of poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. They do not know when eighteen American soldiers died in 1993 in Somalia - in that raid, Mr Bin Laden loves to brag about, he brags about how he helped train the Somalis to kill the Americans, but he never tells you what the Americans were doing there. They were part of a United Nations peacekeeping force, asked by the United Nations to go arrest Mohammed Adid because he, Adid, had murdered twenty-two of our fellow peacekeepers, all Pakistani Muslims. They do not know that before I left office, I recommended and Israel accepted, but the PLO rejected, the most dramatic peace proposal for a comprehensive fair peace in the Middle East to give the Palestinians a state on the West Bank in Gaza and protect Muslim and Palestinian religious and political equities on the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif. They don't know any of that.

Now that's maybe our fault, but we've got to get into this debate and we have to fight. And let me say it's a debate, you know as well as I do, not just in the Middle East. But there are people in this country and in my country who are sympathetic with the terrorists. We had an Afghan mosque in New York City, where on September 12^th, the Imam was a stand-up guy and he got up there and said "this terrorism is terrible, it is wrong, it is immoral, it is a violation of Islam". But a minority of his congregation walked out and started worshipping in the parking lot.

So this is a fight we have to make everywhere which brings me to my last point, and the most important thing of all - although it may sound naïve to you. What this is all about is that simple question: which will be more important in the 21^st Century - our differences or our common humanity? This encounter we have had with the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden and the al-Qaeda and all the debate that has filled the airwaves since, has given us a picture of this debate, and of the very different ideas we have about the nature of truth, the value of life, the content of community. Like fanatics everywhere throughout history, these people think they've got the truth, and if you share their truth, your life has value. And if you don't, you're a legitimate target, even if you're just a six year old girl who went to work with her mother at the World Trade Centre on September 11^th. That's what they think. And they really believe it, like fanatics everywhere. They think to be in their community, you have to look like them, think like them, and act like them, and they know people will stray every now and then, so they pick a few people to beat the living daylights out of those who stray.

Now most of us believe that no-one has the absolute truth. Indeed, in our societies, the most religious among us sometimes feel that most strongly because we believe as children of God, we are by definition, limited in this life, in this body, with our minds. That life is a journey toward truth, that we have something to learn from each other, and that everybody ought to have a chance to make the journey. So for us, a community is just made up of everybody accepts the rules of the game, everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we work together. Now, that's what this is about.

This is not complicated. The people that want to kill us over our differences do so because they think their life doesn't matter except insofar as they are different from and better than others. Those of us who are trying to change ourselves and change them, we think our common humanity is more important and if we could just live up to its potential, the world would be a better place. And which side wins will shape the 21^st Century. What do you think is more important? The answer is easy to give, but very, very hard to live. Think about this as you go home tonight.

Think about how important your differences are to you. Think about how we all organise our lives in little boxes - man, woman, British, American, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Tory, Labour, New Labour, Old Labour, up, down - you know, everything in the world. I like red ties, I got a blue shirt on, you laugh about it, think about everything you define yourself by. Our little boxes are important to us. And indeed it is necessary, how could you navigate life if you didn't know the difference between a child and an adult, an African and an Indian, a scientist and a lawyer? We have to organise that, but somewhere along the way, we finally come to understand that our life is more than all these boxes we're in. And that if we can't reach beyond that, we'll never have a fuller life. And the fanatics of the world, they love their boxes and they hate yours. You're laughing, that's what this is all about. And it's easy to give the right answer but it's hard to live.

When I was my daughter's age, just about to embark on my great adventure in England, just before that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, two of the heroes of my youth, were murdered by their fellow Americans for trying to reconcile the American people to each other. Gandhi, the greatest spirit of the age, murdered, not by an angry Muslim but by a fellow Hindu because he wanted India for the Muslims, and the Jains, and the Sikhs, and the Jews, and the Christians. Sadat - murdered not by an Israeli commando, but by a very angry Egyptian - a member of the organisation now headed by bin Laden's number two guy - an angry Egyptian. Because how could he be a good Egyptian or a good Muslim because he wanted secular government in Egypt and peace with Israel, though he got the desert back. And one of the people I have loved most in my increasingly long life, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered not by a Palestinian terrorist, but by a very angry young Israeli Jew who thought he was not a good Jew or a good Israeli because he wanted lasting peace for Israel through the recognition of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians for a homeland. And that guy who murdered him got exactly what he wanted - he derailed and delayed the peace process and let it be swarmed and mauled by all those people who were under the foolish illusions that their differences matter more than the fact that they are all the children of Abraham.

So that's what I want you to think about. It's great that your kids will live to be ninety years old but I don't want it to be behind barbed wire. It's great that we're gonna have all these benefits of the modern world, but I don't want you to feel like you're emotional prisoners. And I don't want you to look at people who look different from you and see a potential enemy instead of a fellow traveller. We can make the world of our dreams for our children, but since it's a world without walls, it will have to be a home for all our children.

Thank you very much.

I am delighted that so many students are here today. I've come here too many times when I thought there were not enough students in this hall, so I am very glad to see you all and I thank you for coming and I'm sorry that some of you had to wait in line awhile for the tickets. When I came here ten years ago, as your president said, it was a remarkable time, a different time. It was the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the global information age - two realities that govern our lives today that we now take for granted that seemed quite new then.

One point I made 10 years ago still seems to be particularly relevant 10 years later, and I would like to begin with that. Back then I said our foreign policies are not really foreign at all anymore. In a world growing ever more interdependent, the lines between foreign and domestic policy are becoming meaningless, distinctions without a difference. I want to resume the discussion on that point today, 10 years later, with the benefit or the handicap, depending on your view, of eight years as president, and in light of the unfolding events since September 11.

First let me say that anything I say has to be viewed in the context of my present job - I am just a citizen, and as a citizen I support the efforts of President Bush, the national security team, and our allies in fighting the current terrorist threat. I believe we all should. The terrorists who stuck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon believed they were attacking the two most important symbols of American materialism and power. I think they were wrong about that. I live and work in New York, my wife Hillary represents the people of New York as a United States senator, I was commander-in-chief of the people who show up and work everyday at the Pentagon. The people who died represent, in my view, not only the best of America, but the best of the world that I worked hard for eight years to build. A world of great freedom and growing opportunity; a world of citizen responsibility, of growing diversity and sharing community, a world that looks like the student body here today. Look at you. You are from everywhere. Look at us and you will see how more diverse America has grown in the last 30+ years. The terrorists killed people who came to America not to die, but dream, from every continent, from dozens of countries, most every religion on the face of the earth, including in large numbers Islam. They, those that died in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, are part of a very different world and a very different worldview than those who killed them. Now I would submit to you that we are now in a struggle with the soul of the 21^st century and the world in which you students live and raise your own children and make your own way. I believe that there are several things that as Americans we ought to do and I would like to outline them in a fairly direct fashion.

First, we have to win the fight we are in and in that I urge you to keep three things in mind. First of all, terror, the killing of noncombatants for economic, political, or religious reasons has a very long history as long as organized combat itself, and yet, it has never succeeded as a military strategy standing on its own, but it has been around a long time. Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today. Even in the 20^th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.

The second point I want to make is, in that long history, no terrorist campaign standing on its own has ever won, and conventional military strategies that have included terrorism with it have won because of conventional military power, and terrorism has normally been a negative. I will just give you one example from my childhood. In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliant military campaign to cut through the South and go to Atlanta. It was significant and very helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way to, thank God, save the Union. On the way, General Sherman practiced a relatively mild form of terrorism-he did not kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then he burned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederates. It had nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War, but it was a story that was told for a hundred years later, and prevented America from coming together as we might otherwise have done. When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, when we should have been thinking about how we were going to integrate the schools and give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago. So, it is important to remember that normally terrorism has backfired and never has it succeeded on its own.

The third point I want to make is that offense always wins first. Ever since the first person walked out of a cave with a club and before people figured out you could put sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and make it a shield, the people who take up arms win first, and then sooner or later, hopefully sooner, decent people get together and figure out how to defend themselves. When we were born, people thought there would never be a way to defend against continuing nuclear war and we would exterminate ourselves and we found the only known defense, which was mutually assured destruction, but it worked, and no bomb was ever dropped again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So this is troubling, this Anthrax business. I know it is, and it scares you. And it's troubling when 5,000 people die not in some far away battlefield, but in downtown New York on television. But you have to recognize that unless this is something different than has ever occurred in human history, we will figure out how to defend ourselves and civilization will endure. A lot of good people have been working hard on this for a long time. In the years that I served, career law enforcement officials working with our intelligence services and others and people around the world prevented many, many more terrorist attacks than were successful. Attempts to blow up the Holland tunnel, the Los Angeles airport, to blow up planes flying to the Philippines, an attempt on the Pope's life, an attempt to blow up the biggest hotel in Jordan over the Millennium weekend, to destroy a Christian site in the Holy Land, to plant bombs in cities in the Northwest and the Northeast, and many others. They worked hard to strengthen the biological weapons convention and to pass the chemical weapons convention. They worked hard to begin to build our stock of vaccines, and antibiotics and to support an organized civilian preparedness against the kind of problems we face in the current Anthrax scare. Clearly, we needed to do more. September the 11^th happened. And so we are now about the business of improving our defenses with regard to air travel and other critical infrastructure, against attacks from biological weapons and in two other areas that I think are quite important. We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and get it, and we need some legislation on that, and we also need to continue to work on cyber-terrorism, which is profoundly important. So far we've just been laughing about some of these viruses that have invaded our computers and go all around the country in no time, but a great deal of damage could be done to our country unless we are prepared. And one area where we are woefully lacking is the simple use of modern computer technology to track people who come into this country with information already readily available. It does not require us to erode people's civil rights or human rights. But our governmental capacity, notwithstanding the fact that we have tripled our investment in counter-terrorism in the last few years, to do what is normally done by mass mailing firms, is not there. And we have to support this and we have to support the current government and whatever decision they make to do it, even if they have to contract with private companies for awhile, but we should be able to find people who come here and stay around a long time before they organize a big hit. So we will have to support all these things.

But the larger point I want to make is that we will do this, and for all of you who've never lived through anything like this, whose childhood was never colored by any kind of threat of security: when we were kids a lot of us used to have to do drills where we would go to fallout shelters where we would run if anybody ever dropped a nuclear weapon, and you learned to live with it. And the people that were taking care of us did a good job, and it never happened. So the first thing I want to say to you is you cannot be paralyzed by this. No terrorist strategy has ever prevailed, people who want to damage always win the beginning but people always figure out defenses. And the ultimate purpose of terrorism is not to win military victories anyway but to terrorize, to make you afraid to get up in the morning, afraid of the future, and afraid of each other. I met an Egyptian the first day I went down to see the people in the crisis center after September 11^th. This big Egyptian fellow with tears in his eyes said, "I'm an Egyptian Muslim American, and I hate what happened worse than you do probably, and I'm so afraid my fellow American will never trust me again". That's what they want. So what I want to say to you first is, we have to support the war in Afghanistan and the work at home, and it may be frightening to you, but you have to stay centered, and you have to understand that you're trying to create something that is really special, a country where everybody can have a home if they share the same set of values. And you can't give in to it. It's going to be all right.

Now the second thing I want to say is, it's not enough to win the fight we're in. You've probably had some arguments on campus. If not, you've certainly read them, you've seen on television, there are a lot of people who just don't see the world the way we do and certainly don't see America in a very favorable light. And it is quite important that we do more to build the pool of potential partners in the world, and shrink the pool of potential terrorists. And that has nothing to do with the fight we're in. That has to do with what else we do, and that depends upon basically how you analyze the world. I've been going all over the world and I've been all over America going through this exercise so I'll take you through it.

Imagine yourself on September the 10^th. Nothing's happened on September 11^th. Try to remember how you viewed the world on September 10^th. If I had asked you on that day, "What is the single most dominant element of the 21^st Century world?" what would your answer have been? What would you have said? Since you're living here and we've been doing reasonable well the last few years, I can think of one of four answers you might have given if you're a positive sort of person. You might have said, "Well, the global economy". The globalization of the economy is the most dominant element because it's made America 22 and a half million jobs and it's lifted more people out of poverty in the last 30 years than were ever lifted out in all of human history. Or you might have said, "No, it's the information technology revolution because that's what's given us all the productivity that has driven the economic growth". When I became president in January of '93 there were only 50 sites on the worldwide web. When I left office there were 350 million. In eight years. Today, before the Anthrax scare, there were 30 times as many messages transmitted by email as the postal services every day in America. Or you might have said, "Oh, no, as impressive as those things are, the most significant thing about the early 21^st century will be the advances in biological sciences". It will rival the significance of the discovery of DNA. It will rival the significance of Newtonian physics. We sequenced the human genome; we're developing microscopic testing mechanisms. Soon we'll be able to identify cancers when they're just a few cells in size. Soon we'll be able to give young mothers gene cards to take home with their newborn babies and in countries with good health systems, children will have life expectancies in excess of 90 years. Or you might have said, if you're like me and you're into politics and this kind of thing, you might have said, "No, the most important thing about the modern world is the growth of democracy and diversity, because that is the environment within which all the economic growth, all the technological growth, and all the scientific advances flourish best". I was honored to be president at the first time in history when more than half the world's people lived under governments of their own choosing, and when America, as witnessed by your presence here today, and other advanced countries became far more diverse racially, ethnically, and religiously than ever before, and the societies were actually working, and working better, and I might add, a lot more interesting because of our diversity. So, you could have said any of that.

On the other hand, if you live in a poor country or you are more pessimistic you might have answered one of four negative things. You could have said, "No, no, you got it wrong about the economy. Global poverty will dominate the early 21^st century because half the world's people aren't in this global economy". They live on less than two dollars a day, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water, and one woman dies every minute in childbirth. And that's a recipe for explosion, and that will dominate the world. Or you might have said, "No, before that happens, the environmental crises will consume us. The shortage of water, the deterioration of the oceans from which we get our oxygen, and most of all global warming". If the earth warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10, we'll lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island. The Florida Everglades I worked so hard to save. Whole Pacific Island nations will be flooded, and tens of millions of food refugees will be created, destabilizing governments and causing violence. Or you could have said, "Well, no, before global warming gets us the epidemics will". All over the world public health systems are crashing down, and just to take AIDS as an example, there are now over 36 million AIDS cases, 22 million people have already died. If we don't turn the trend around there will be 100 million AIDS cases in 5 years, making it the worst epidemic since the Plague swept Europe in the 14^th century and killed one in four people. And the fastest growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe's back door, and the second fastest growing rates are in the Caribbean on our front door, and the third fastest growing rates are in India, the biggest democracy in the world. And the Chinese just admitted they had twice as many cases as they had previously thought, and only 4% of the adults in our biggest nation know how AIDS is contracted and spread. So today, two thirds of the cases are in Africa. Tomorrow, it's everybody's problem, unless we turn it around. Or you might have said even on September the 10^th, if you'd been keeping up with this, "No, no, no, even before the health crises. We will be consumed by terrorism, by the marriage of modern weapons of destruction to ancient racial, religious and tribal hatreds".

Now here's how I think you ought to think about this. What do the positive things I mentioned, the global economy, the explosion of information technology, the biological sciences advances, and democracy and diversity, and the negative things I mentioned, global poverty, the environmental crises, the health crises, and terror, what do all eight of those things have in common? They all reflect the absolutely breathtaking increase in global interdependence, the extent of which the barriers of nation borders don't count for much anymore, and to which we are all effected by things that happen a long way from home. Things that used to happen a long way form home can now happen next door. In other words, I honestly believe it's very important if you want to understand the world in which you live that you see September the 11^th as the dark side from all the benefits we've gotten from tearing down the walls, collapsing the distances and spreading the information that we have across the world. We have not changed human nature, we have not solved all the problems, and there are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do. You cannot collapse walls, collapse differences and spread information without making yourself more vulnerable to forces of destruction. You cannot claim the benefits of this new world without becoming more vulnerable at home. Now having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that the 21^st century will claim as many innocent lives as the 20^th century did. Keep in mind, it's scary, it happened in our country, and if you live in New York, in your town, and on television. And maybe someone you know died. Most of us who live in New York know somebody who died. But remember, in World War I nine million people died. Between the wars 20 million people died from corrupt and bad governments. In World War II, over 20 million people died. After World War II another 20 million people died from oppressive governments. More than a million died in Korea. Somewhere around a million died in Vietnam. 700,000 people died in Rwanda in 90 days from people killing each other with machetes. I think it is unlikely, if we do the right things, in spite of how terrifying this is, that the 21^st century will be anything like the killer that the 20^th century was. But we cannot ignore that fact that we have vulnerability at home because of our interdependence. All the interdependence that's brought us all these wonderful advances in technology and science and economically that benefited America so much required us to tear down the walls, collapse distances and spread information, and it made us more vulnerable.

Now, if you accept that analysis, I hope the first thing I said is more compelling. We've got to win the fight we're in. The al-Quaeda network and Mr. bin Laden are of an order of magnitude today more able than any other terrorist network in the world. But it is not enough because there's no way for us to put the Genie back in the bottle. It's not like we can go take care of business in Afghanistan and put the walls up and put the distances back and bring the information back. It's not like we can reverse the world we live in. And you wouldn't like it if we did. I suspect you like most of the positive things about this new world. Therefore we have to look ahead and say, ok, so we'll win the fight we're in but we also have to create a world where we have more partners and fewer potential terrorists. And how are we going to do that? We have to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens of the 21^st century world, number one. Number two, we have to deal with the fact that most terrorists come from places that aren't democracies. And number three, we have to deal with the special challenges presented in the Muslim world, because Islam's our fastest growing religion in America, and we have to lift up the positive forces there, and encourage those with enough courage to stand up for them. When I moved to New York, I was given a book written in 1949 by a wonderful writer named E.B. White, called Here is New York. He commented on the fact that New Yorkers and a lot of other people died in Pearl Harbor, and how vulnerable they felt after the atom bomb dropped in Hiroshima, and the irony that the United Nations building, the symbol of peace, was being built in New York after the war in response to the dropping of the atom bomb. Here's what he said 52 years ago. It could have been written on September 11^th:

We now see a race between the destroying planes in the struggling parliament of man. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution. This riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence and racial brotherhood. This lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway is the home of all people and all nations, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errands forestalled.

Amazing, isn't it? 52 years ago he foresaw a time when New York would be attacked from the air as the symbol of all peoples and all places. At the time he thought it was because the UN was there. Now all New York looks like the UN, just like you do. I'll say again, this is a struggle to define the soul of the 21^st century. We have to win the fight we're in but we also have to create more partners and reduce the terrorist pool. So what do we have to do? First, we have to reduce poverty and create more economic opportunity. Last year we relieved the debt of the poorest countries. We ought to do more of it, because we only relieved the debt if they would put money to education, health care, or economic development, to make sure the money wouldn't be wasted, and the stories are stunning, what's being done with this money in these countries. We should do more of that. Last year we gave two million micro-enterprise loans to poor people in Asia, Latin American, and Africa. We ought to be giving 20 million a year or more. They average 50, 60 dollars apiece. They put a lot of poor village people in businesses. We should do more, a lot cheaper than going to war. There's a Peruvian economist named Hernando De Soto who wrote a book I recommend to all of you called The Mystery of Capital, pointing out that the poor people of the world control today 5 trillion dollars in assets in their homes and their businesses, but they are still shut out of capitalism because they can't borrow any money on their assets, because their assets are not recognized within the legal system of their country. For businesses, because the legal system is so bogged-down and cumbersome and expensive that people can't get into it at an affordable price, and for people who live in shanties, they have no way getting addresses or land titles that can be verified and protected in court, so nobody will loan them money on their houses. So De Soto says, he's going around the world working on every continent saying, look, if you could just let poor people legitimize their assets, then they could get credit and it would be far better than all the foreign aid and foreign investment put together, because they have 5 trillion dollars worth of stuff, it's just useless to them. We ought to pay to help this guy do this project in every country in the world. You ought to hear the history of American property rights. We fought over this for decades. But you think about it, every one of you that take for granted your family's home mortgage or car loan or business loan. The reason you can get a car loan is, you can establish title to the car, and it's an asset worth something so people can loan you money on it. We ought to fund this around the world. We ought to train people to do what we take for granted in America. One of my former administration members is out here in the audience, Melanne Verveer. She and her husband were my classmates at Georgetown and she was Hilary's chief of staff and she now is working with Georgetown with a group called Vital Voices, which Hilary and Melanne helped to establish, women's groups all over the world working for peace and also empowerment. They've had here women from China, Vietnam and other places training them to do what we take for granted. This doesn't cost any money and it wins big benefits. So, these are the kinds of things that we ought to do economically.

Second thing we ought to do is get the kids of the world in school. There are a hundred million children who never go to school. In a poor country, one year of schooling is worth 10% to 20% increased income for life, every year. We can do this for not much money. Brazil, a developing country, has 97% of its kids in school. Why? Because they pay the mothers - not the fathers, the mothers - in the 30% of the poorest families a fixed amount a month if they send their kids to school. And they get a little card, it looks like a credit card, it says Bolsa-Escola on it, and if then once a month they get a certificate from school that their kid was there 85% of the time. They show up at the local lottery office and they get their cash. So not surprisingly, they're all in school. It's not rocket science. 10 years from now, you can remember this, 10 years from now you check how Brazil's doing compared to other developing countries because they did this today. In my last year as president we got 300 million dollars, not much in a 1.7 trillion dollar budget, to feed six million children a good meal every day for a year, if - but only if - they come to school. I just got the first report on it from Senator McGovern and Senator Dole, and Congressman McGovern from Massachusetts who are handling this program, and it's amazing. Kids are flooding into schools who didn't go before because they come from families that don't have the ability to give them a good meal every day. You know, this is cheap. This is a lot cheaper than going to war, and it makes a big difference. I should also point out that one of the big problems we're having right now in the conflict in Afghanistan is the impact of the so-called Madrassas in religious schools on the mindset of the children. You've probably all seen stories about it, but it's not true that those kids were sent to those schools because their mothers and fathers thought Usama bin Laden was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Most of them went there because their regular schools closed when the government couldn't fund them anymore. And I saw a story about one boy whose brother the parents paid for and couldn't get a job, so they just didn't pay for this kid to go to a private school so he ends up in Madrassa being indoctrinated instead of educated. We ought to pay to send these kids to school. A lot cheaper than going to war, and builds you a better life.

Same argument applies to AIDS. Secretary General Kofi Annan's asked for seven billion dollars a year for a global fund to fight infectious diseases. I tell you, I've done a lot of work in this area. We can turn this epidemic around in three years. Brazil cut the death rate in half in three years with medicine and prevention. Uganda, with no medicine cut the death rate in half in 5 years. We do not have to have 100 million AIDS cases in 5 years. We do not have to let countries be consumed by this. I promise you, fledgling democracies will be destroyed by this. They will not be able to sustain an AIDS caseload of 100 million. And we don't have to have it happen. We ought to fund this program. It's not very much money.

Same argument applies to global warming. We could actually make money out of that, and so could the developing world. There's a trillion dollar untapped market for alternative energy and energy conservation technologies that are available right now. All we have to do is to help finance it. We would actually make money and create jobs at a time when America needs some jobs, we could use some more jobs now. And so, I think, I want to emphasize to you, I think this is really important. If we do these things we will create a more positive interdependent world.

I further think we must do more about democracy. 10 years ago I said it ought to matter to us how people govern themselves because democracies by and large don't go to war with each other, don't sponsor terrorist acts against each other, and are more likely to be reliable partners, protect the environment, and abide by the law. Democracy is a stabilizing force. It provides a nonviolent means for resolving disputes. I believe that. And it's no accident that most of these terrorists come from non-democratic countries. If you live in a country where you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, where you never even have to ask whether there's something you should be doing to solve your own problems, then people are kept in a kind of a permanent state of collective immaturity and it becomes quite east for them to believe that someone else's success is the cause of their distress. Now I've already told you I think we ought to be doing more to help, but there's some people you can't help if they don't help themselves. And I think this is a very, very important point. I have seen so many instances where peoples simply did not have any reference point because they were never required to take responsibility for themselves. If your families had raised you and they were so worried that you were going to hurt yourself that from the time that you were six 'til the time it came time for you to go to Georgetown they never let out of house, you would have still been six emotionally, if you had never been able to leave the house. That's what it's like if you never get to have a say in your own life. I also think it's important when countries make a decision to be democracies that we recognize we ought to help them. I just got back from Spain where King Juan Carlos and Mikhail Gorbachov sponsored a conference designed specifically to help countries succeed once they choose democracy. You've got to deliver economic growth and honest government, and it's not as easy as it sounds.

Last point I want to make is this. We have to recognize that special challenges are presented by the Muslim world. I think I've earned a right to say this, I was the first president ever to recognize the feast of Eid-al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan every year. To bring large numbers of Muslims into the White House and to consult in every way. The last time we used military power was to protect the lives of poor Muslims, in Bosnia and Kosovo. And I tried to create a peace in the Middle East that would give the West Bank to the Palestinians and protect their equities in Jerusalem and a Palestinian state.

I think I have earned the right to say that this is partly a Muslim issue because there is a war raging within Islam about what they should think about the United States in particular and the west in general. And the war can be found in America. I was in Buffalo the other day and on the front page of the newspaper, a part-time chaplain at the state prison up there was suspended from her job for bragging on bin Laden and basically expressing sympathy with the terrorists. The New Republic has a story saying a prominent activist is now in trouble with the White House because he kept bringing Muslims into the White House who actually supported terrorist networks. This debate is going on all over America and all over the world. We've got to flesh this out. We've got to quit pretending like this is not going on.

One problem is that in the Middle East most governments are characterized either as theocracies, that is, there is no separation between faith and state, or they're secular governments but they're either very weak democracies or they're not real democracies. And underneath there are fundamentalist movements that essentially say the west is the source of all evil, and all truth was revealed and knowable once the Koran was given to Mohammad, and the practices of the Prophet were codified in the ensuing 300 years after his death. So it's all backward looking. No open questions, nothing debatable. And in the complex combustible mixture of a lot of these countries, a lot of the governments allow people to go into the Mosques and demonize us and demonize the West and demonize Christianity and demonize Jews because as long as they do that they think they're shifting the heat of popular distress off of the governments. And a lot of these folks have been our friends, America's friends and my friends. But we have created a discordant world in which it's hard to sort out who's where here. And we've now reached a point with all these people lying dead and these terrorist threats, with the Anthrax and everything where people need to actually say what it is they believe. What do you believe is right and wrong?

And we need to a better job of getting the facts out. Most Muslims in the Middle East I'll guarantee you don't know the last time we used our military power was to protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. I had a Kosovar family in my office yesterday in Harlem, bringing their kids to see me because they were so grateful that America had given them a chance to build their lives. Most people in the Middle East have forgotten, if they did know, that it was America that advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state and a reconciliation with Israel, which would protect both sides' equities in Jerusalem. Now, we're not for running Israel out of the Middle East. If that's what they want, they ought to say that, but don't pretend that America has not been sensitive to the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. It's not true. And I think in America we need to do more to give courage and voice and pictures to our vibrant Muslim community of people that are anti-terror. We ought to get out all over the world how many Muslims died in the World Trade Center and what countries they claimed as home. Everywhere I go in New York, yesterday I was down in a park and these young people came up to me and said they were proud to be Muslims and proud to be living in America. One was Egyptian, one was Pakistani, and they just hated all this terrorism. They ought to be given courage and identified and given support to stand against this.

And we need to do something, I will say again, about the schools. I saw a story the other day about a kid in a school in one of these Madrassas who was taught everything about the Koran and he was a very admirable young man, the kind of person you'd like to have in your family. He got up at four o'clock every morning to pray, he could answer any conceivable question about the Koran. He had good character, but a poisoned mind. He was taught that no man every walked on the moon but that dinosaurs existed because Americans and Jews re-created them to devour Muslims. But he was a good kid. He didn't teach himself that.

So, we have to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate. You have, you know, Mr. Esposito here at Georgetown whose book is probably the most well thought of text about the history of Islam. But you ought to understand what have been the theological battles between the conservatives, the fundamentalists, and the moderates in Islam. Why has it been 1,000 years since there was a serious challenge mounted from reformist moderates? Except for Attaturk in Turkey, what Sadat wished to do and didn't live to do in Egypt, and what King Hussein did in Jordan. In 1991 he got everybody together and he said, "I'll give up some powers. I'll let you have a parliament, everybody can run, the fundamentalists can run, but here are the boundaries beyond which you can't step, because we're going to hold this country together". It is no accident that in the inner Middle East it is the most stable country now, because there is some popular expression of opinion and people have to take some responsibility for themselves. And that's the last thing I want to say to all of you here.

This battle fundamentally is about what you think of the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. You're at a university which basically believes that no one ever has the whole truth, ever, because you're human. It's part of being a human being. It's part of the limitation imposed on us by God. We are incapable of ever having the whole truth. They believe they got it. Because we don't believe you can have the whole truth, we think everybody counts and life is a journey. Hopefully we get wiser as we make this journey, and we learn from each other, and we think everybody ought to be entitled to make the journey. They believe that because they have the truth you either share their truths or you don't. If you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel. If you are and you don't agree with them, you're a heretic, and you're a legitimate target. Even a six-year old girl who went to work with her mother at the World Trade Center on September 11^th. We believe that a community is you. Doesn't matter where you come from, doesn't matter what your religious faith is, you just got to accept certain rules of the game: everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, we all do better when we help each other, and we ought to argue like crazy because nobody's got the truth and we're trying to get closer. They believe communities of people are those who look alike, act alike, dress alike, and just to make sure they enforce the rules. That's why you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks in the Taliban in the movies on television. They paint the women's windows black, so God forbid, they won't be able to see outside and might be polluted, and in some cases even shoot people when they go outside where they shouldn't go.

This is not a perfect society, but it is one that is stumbling in the right direction. When you strip everything I said today down to one sentence, it basically comes down to this. Ever since civilizations began, people have fought with their own inner demons over whether what we have in common is the most important thing about life, or whether our differences are the most important thing about life. That's what all this comes down to. I'm glad America is a lot more different than it was when I was your age. This is a much, much more interesting country. But what gives us the freedom to celebrate our differences is the certainty of our common humanity. Otherwise we'd have to fight each other over our differences. But this is very hard to do. Remember this is a country that was born in slavery. In my lifetime Martin Luther King was killed just before, a couple of months before I graduated from Georgetown, trying to preach this message. Bobby Kennedy killed two days before our college graduation, trying to preach this message. The greatest spirit of the age, Gandhi, killed not by a mad Muslim but by a Hindu who thought he was a traitor because he thought India could be a home for the Muslims and the Sikhs and the Jains and everybody. Sadat killed not by an Israeli commando, but by the predecessor of the number two guy in al-Quaeda 20 years ago, angry at him, not a good Egyptian because he was not a faithful Muslim believing as he did in secular government and peace with Israel. And my great friend, Yitzhak Rabin killed not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli who thought he was not a good Jew or a patriotic Israeli because he wanted peace and a homeland for the Palestinians as the surest means of security for the Israelis.

This is not easy to do, but I'm telling you, no terrorist campaign has ever succeeded, and this one won't if you don't give it permission. You can have the most exciting time in human history, but we have to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. Then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things that we deny for others. Then in the end, we've got to be able to stand up and say, we are not against Islam, but we want to have a clear understanding about what we think is the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. If we do that, you will still live in the best time the world has ever known.

Thank you very much.

In recent days, members of the congressional majority have displayed a reckless partisanship - it threatens America's economic well being and, now, our national security.

Yesterday, hard line Republicans irresponsibly forced a vote against the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This was partisan politics of the worst kind, because it was so blatant and because of the risks it poses to the safety of the American people and the world.

What the Senate seeks is to abandon an agreement that requires other countries to do what we have already done; an agreement that constrains Russia and China, India and Pakistan from developing more dangerous nuclear weapons; that helps to keep other countries out of the nuclear weapons business altogether; that improves our ability to monitor dangerous weapons activities in other countries. Even worse, they have offered no alternative, no other means of keeping countries around the world from developing nuclear arsenals and threatening our security.

In so doing, they ignored the advice of our top military leaders, our most distinguished scientists, our closest allies. They brushed aside the views of the American people and betrayed the vision of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, who set us on the road to this treaty so many years ago.

Even more troubling are the signs of a new isolationism among some of the opponents of the treaty. You see it in the refusal to pay our U.N. dues. You see it in the woefully inadequate budget for foreign affairs and includes meeting our obligations to the Middle East peace process and to the continuing efforts to destroy and safeguard Russian nuclear materials. You see it in the refusal to adopt our proposals to do our part to stem the tide of global warming, even though these proposals plainly would create American jobs.

But by this vote, the Senate majority has turned its back on 50 years of American leadership against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They are saying America does not need to lead, either by effort or by example. They are saying we don't need our friends or allies. They are betting our children's future on the reckless proposition that we can go it alone; that at the height of our power and prosperity, we should bury our heads in the sand, behind a wall.

That is not where I stand. And that is not where the American people stand. They understand that, to be strong, we must not only have a powerful military; we must also lead, as we have done time and again, and as the whole world expects us to do, to build a more responsible, interdependent world.

So we will continue to protect our interests around the world. We will continue to seek from Congress the financial resources to make that possible. We will continue to pursue the fight against the spread of nuclear weapons. And we will not - we will not - abandon the commitments inherent in the treaty, and resume testing ourselves.

I will not let yesterday's partisanship stand as our final word on the test ban treaty. Today, I say again, on behalf of the United States, we will continue the policy we have maintained since 1992 of not conducting nuclear tests. I call on Russia, China, Britain, France, and all other countries to continue to refrain from testing. I call on nations that have not done so to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And I will continue to do all I can to make that case to the Senate. When all is said and done I have no doubt that the United States will ratify this treaty.

Partisanship also threatens our economic security. Exactly one week from today the continuing resolution I signed on September 30^th, to keep the government running will expire. And, yet, Congress is not even close to finishing its work. At this time of unprecedented prosperity we must ask ourselves why is the congressional majority so unwilling, or unable, to make the tough choices. Why would we not be willing - or why would they not be willing to send me a responsible budget that saves Social Security, that strengthens and modernizes Medicare, that honors the priorities of the American people and that clearly continues to pay down our debt, keeping interest rates low and the economy growing?

When I signed the continuing resolution two weeks ago, I urged Congress to roll up its sleeves and finish the job the American people sent them here to do. I said they should stop playing politics, stop playing games, start making the necessary tough choices. Instead, we have the Republicans lurching from one unworkable idea to the next. Instead of sending me bills I can sign, the congressional majority is still using what the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and others have called "budget gimmicks", to disguise the fact that the are spending the Social Security surplus. Their own budget office says so.

We've even seen them try to raise taxes for our hardest-pressed working families. Now, they're talking about across-the-board budget cuts that could deny tens of thousands of children Head Start opportunities, drastically reduce medical research, sacrifice military readiness, jeopardize the safety of air traffic control. One day they raise the spending, the next day they talk about cutting it again.

I say to the congressional majority: enough is enough. We've got a job to do for the American people; it is not that difficult. Let's just do it. We can work together. We can fashion a budget that builds on our economic prosperity and continues to pay down the debt until it is eliminated in 2015 for the first time since 1835; that extends the life of the Social Security trust fund to 2050, the life expanse of almost all the baby boomers; and that invests in our people and our future, especially in our children's education.

The American people want a world-class education for their children. They want smaller classes, more qualified teachers, more computers in the classrooms, more after-school programs for the children who need it, more Head Start opportunities to ensure that our children all start school ready to learn.

The majority so far has failed to come forward with a plan that protects these goals. I believe these goals are worth fighting for and that's what this debate is all about.

They want us to keep making their communities safer, that's what the American people want. They want us stay with the plan that has resulted in the lowest crime rate in 26 years. They want us to continue to put more cops on the beat and get guns out of the wrong hands. The majority wants to take us off that course and derail our progress. I want to keep us on track in education, in crime, in the budget, in Social Security, in Medicare.

The American people want us to stand up for the environment by preserving our treasured landscapes and enhancing our community's quality of life. The majority would roll back our progress there, too. I want to build on it. That's what this debate is all about.

I want to work with Congress to fulfill these important obligations. We have proved we can do it with the Welfare Reform Bill, with the Balanced Budget Act, with the budget last year, in the teeth of a partisan election season, which made a big downpayment on our goal of 100,000 teachers. We need it again: a workable, bipartisan budget process. We don't have that today; we've got a week to go. They've got to go to work.

There are legitimate differences of opinion. But we can put an end to reckless partisanship, to gimmicks and gamesmanship. We can put people first, and make a principled, honorable compromise. We can work for a season of progress, not a winter of politics. And I am committed to do just that.

Today I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security.

I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary.

Our target was terror. Our mission was clear - to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.

The groups associated with him come from diverse places, but share a hatred for democracy, a fanatical glorification of violence, and a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents.

They have made the United States their adversary precisely because of what we stand for and what we stand against.

A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America, saying - and I quote - "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets."

Their mission is murder. And their history is bloody.

In recent years, they killed American, Belgian and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia. They plotted to assassinate the president of Egypt and the Pope. They planned to bomb six United States 747's over the Pacific.

They bombed the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. They gunned down German tourists in Egypt. The most recent terrorist events are fresh in our memory. Two weeks ago, 12 Americans and nearly 300 Kenyans and Tanzanians lost their lives. And another 5,000 were wounded when our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed.

There is convincing information from our intelligence community that the bin Laden terrorist network was responsible for these bombings. Based on this information, we have high confidence that these bombings were planned, financed and carried out by the organization bin Laden leads.

America has battled terrorism for many years. Where possible, we've used law enforcement and diplomatic tools to wage the fight. The long arm of American law has reached out around the world and brought to trial those guilty of attacks in New York, in Virginia and in the Pacific.

We have quietly disrupted terrorist groups and foiled their plots. We have isolated countries that practice terrorism. We've worked to build an international coalition against terror. But there have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough.

When our very national security is challenged and when we must take extraordinary steps to protect the safety of our citizens. With compelling evidence that the bin Laden network of terrorist groups was planning to mount further attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving people, I decided America must act.

And so this morning, based on the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, I ordered our armed forces to take action to counter an immediate threat from the bin Laden network.

Earlier today, the United States carried out simultaneous strikes against terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan. Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the bin Laden network's infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe.

We have reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place there today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions.

Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.

The United States does not take this action lightly. Afghanistan and Sudan have been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups.

But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens. Let me express my gratitude to our intelligence and law enforcement agencies for their hard, good work. And let me express my pride in our armed forces, who carried out this mission while making every possible effort to minimize the loss of innocent lives.

I want you to understand, I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam, the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace-loving people all around the world, including the United States. No religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children. But our actions were aimed at fanatics and killers who wrap murder in the cloak of righteousness, and in so doing, profane the great religion in whose name they claim to act.

My fellow Americans, our battle against terrorism did not begin with the bombing of our embassies in Africa, nor will it end with today's strike.

It will require strength, courage and endurance. We will not yield to this threat. We will meet it no matter how long it may take. This will be a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism.

We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must. America is and will remain a target of terrorists precisely because we are leaders; because we act to advance peace, democracy and basic human values; because we're the most open society on earth; and because, as we have shown yet again, we take an uncompromising stand against terrorism.

But of this, I am also sure. The risks from inaction to America and the world would be far greater than action. For that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact.

In this case, we knew before our attack that these groups already had planned further actions against us and others.

I want to reiterate the United States wants peace, not conflict. We want to lift lives around the world, not take them. We have worked for peace in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, in Haiti, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But in this day, no campaign for peace can succeed without a determination to fight terrorism. Let our actions today send this message loud and clear: there are no expendable American targets.

There will be no sanctuary for terrorists. We will defend our people, our interests and our values. We will help people of all faiths, in all parts of the world, who want to live free of fear and violence.

We will persist and we will prevail.

Thank you, God bless you and may God bless our country.