"A struggle for the soul of the 21st century"

A speech given by former President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University on Nov. 7.

Editor's note: Conservatives blasted former President Clinton for his Nov. 7 Georgetown University speech, after a Washington Times story said Clinton called Sept. 11 the "price" the U.S. had to pay for its misdeeds. Here is the full text of Clinton's speech.

Nov. 10, 2001 | Thank you very much. Thank you, Brian, for your remarks. Thank you, President DeGioia, for what you said and your leadership at Georgetown. It is kind of hard for me to get used to a president younger than I am. Thank you, Dean Gallucci, for helping me to come here and for the great work you did in our administration when I was president. And I would also like to thank the large number of people here who are my classmates, friends, who served as ambassadors and in other positions in my administration. All of them are sitting there thinking that it seemed like yesterday when all of us looked like all of you. So I think I can say for all of them, we are very grateful for what Georgetown did for us. We loved it when we were here and we love it still and we are honored to be part of a family that has given me this opportunity. I would also like to say a special word of thanks to one of my professors, Fr. Otto Hentz, who is here. He never abandoned me for all these years, even though he did not succeed in convincing me to become a Jesuit.

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 10 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 struck 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-plus 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 for the soul of the 21st 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 Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told 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 20th 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.

Next page: "We will figure out how to defend ourselves and civilization will endure"