Transcript: Speech to the Association of Southern California Defense Counsel

March 4, 2005
Los Angeles, CA

Thank you very much, Dennis, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks again to the Marine Band. You shouldn’t have the Marine Band for an ex President. You know, you might get to thinking you’re still in office. [LAUGHS] This has been a happy day for me. When I came backstairs, I was in the holding room waiting to be called out and I looked up and Darrel Hanna was there, the man who played me on Saturday Night Live. [LAUGHS] I’ve been gone from office long enough, I tried to convince him to come out here and give the speech [LAUGHS] and see if anyone would know the difference. [LAUGHS]

The first time I ever came to this hotel, they took me upstairs to a suite and I got off the elevator, and I thought-- I said, “I really am in California.” I got off the elevator and Rodney Dangerfield was standing there. [LAUGHS] who lived in this hotel, with orchids in his arms for me. I was really touched. I thought I was going to be invited to the prom or something. [LAUGHS] And he said, “Don’t be too touched.” He said, “My girlfriend raises these and I’m trying to promote her business.” [LAUGHS] So I felt like I was the one with no respect then. It turned out to be very good preparation for the rest of my presidency. [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE] Anyway, if Darrel is still back there, thanks for coming to say hello and thanks for giving America so many laughs. I love Saturday Night Live, even when I hated it. [LAUGHS]

I know that the format of this program is for me to make a few remarks and then to open the floor to questions. I think there are several, and you may want to ask some that I wasn’t told about, but, [LAUGHS] which is okay too. I don’t have to worry about any kind of scripting now. The great thing about being out of office is you can say whatever you want. [LAUGHS] And the tragic thing is no one cares anymore. [LAUGHS] But you can say whatever you want.

I want to thank the L.A. Chief of Police, a long time friend of mine, Bill Bratton for being here. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] I think you have Justices Chin and Moreno of the California Supreme Court, I thank you for being here. I am delighted to be here.

Here’s what I’d like to do because I know-- I know there are several questions but-- Seeing the Marines here reminded me of the presence of the Marine Corp and the young men and women of the United States Navy that I felt so strongly on my recent trip to Asia, where former President Bush and I toured four of the countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives) that were hit hard by the tsunami. And one of the things that was most moving was how grateful the people there were for the rapid help that the United States military forces gave people who were otherwise completely isolated and unable to receive humanitarian supplies. They were dropped from American helicopters. I never will forget the first time we got to the first stop in Thailand, we met with a group of orphans, who were being given an interesting form of therapy. We saw the same thing later in Sri Lanka. These children were asked to, instead of to talk about their feelings, they were asked to draw pictures of what they were thinking about. And in the beginning almost all of them drew pictures of the tragedy, and then as time went on, almost all of them moved onto other things, and those who didn’t were the ones that needed special assistance.

But President Bush and I were given two beautiful children’s drawings. One of them had drawn a picture of his mother drowning, along with cars and other things sinking into the ocean and the other had drawn a picture of an American military helicopter dropping humanitarian supplies to children. So I raise that because I want you to keep this in mind. The main purpose of my talk today is to try to give you some sort of framework within which to evaluate all of the disparate things going on in America and in our country today. Because one of the things I tried to do as President and one of the things I think every political leader should do is to synthesize information for people and organize it in a way that makes a lot of apparently disconnected events fit into a pattern. So just think of the things that have been in the news in recent days: the murder of a man who was a friend of mine, with whom I spent an hour and a half with, 10 days before he was killed, Rafik Harini in Lebanon, leading to massive demonstrations in the streets and the overthrow of the Lebanese government and widespread demands led by the United States and France for the removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon; the work of the tsunami; the debate in Congress over the Bankruptcy Bill. And I could give you 20 other examples. Just think of all the public things you’ve read about.

What could they possibly all have in common and how would you go about thinking about it? If someone asked me to describe in a word, the world of the 21st Century, the word I would choose clearly is “interdependence.” I would not choose “globalization” because for most people it has an economic connotation, number one; and number two, half the people aren’t part of it. Half the people on earth still live on less than $2.00 a day; a billion people still live on less than $1.00 a day and one in four people don’t even have access to clean water. So they’re not part of this globalized system that was so good to America when I was President. It produced 30% of our income, gains and job growth, through trade and high technology. Interdependence basically says that we’re tied together economically, politically, culturally and in terms of communication to a greater extent than ever before. But interdependence can be positive or negative, or both, and I will give you some self-evident examples.

When people saw the United States military delivering humanitarian supplies to poor Muslims in remote villages in Northern Sumatra, in the Province of Aceh and Indonesia, it was an example of positive interdependence and it did a world of good for America’s image in a part of the world and with a group of people that often didn't think too well of us.

On September the 11th, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists, none of whom were born in America, murdered 3,000 people from 70 countries including over 200 other Muslims, they too reflected almost perfectly the forces of global interdependence. Why? Because they used open borders, easy immigration, easy travel, easy access to information and technology to turn jet airplanes into big chemical weapons to destroy a bunch of people in a classic example of global interdependence.

If you look at the Middle East, you see how it can be positive and negative both. In 1993, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin and Yassar Arafat signed a Peace Agreement on the White House lawn and we proceeded to implement it. We worked on it for seven years and we had seven years of progress toward peace. In those seven years there were always terrorist groups trying to interrupt the peace process in the Middle East. But about 258 Israelis were killed in the whole eight years I was President, by terrorist attacks. Then Arafat foolishly walked away from my last peace proposal, the second Intifada started and the United States withdrew from the Middle East peace process for a time. And in the next four years, until Mr. Arafat died, 1,100 Israelis died in terrorist incidents, three times as many, almost, as had died-- No, more than four times as many as had died in the previous eight years and over 4,000 Palestinians died.

Then Mr. Arafat passed away. They had legitimate elections and Abu Mazen or Muhammad I mean Mahmoud Abbas was elected. The new leader of the Palestinians said the terror was over as far as he’s concerned. He’s ready to make peace. Prime Minister Sharon says he’s going to get out of Gaza, and we’re back to working together. Now there’s still negative interdependence there. We still have people killed by terrorist events, but it’s dramatically different.

The point of that is from the good times to the bad times, which included not only all the killing but in 1998, a year in which Israel had a change of government, and yet it was the only year in the history of the state of Israel, in which not one person was killed by a terrorist attack, not one. Because we were all working together. But the people were just as interdependent in 1998 as they were in 2000 when everything went to pieces again. Because it simply means they couldn’t escape each other.

So clearly the main work of people as citizens of the 21st Century is to build up the positive forces of interdependence and beat down the negative ones and to create a more integrated set of communities at home and around the world. To move from interdependence to integration requires three things: shared responsibilities, shared benefits and a set of simple shared values, every person counts, deserves a chance and has a responsible role to play in society. Competition is good but we all do better when we work together. Our differences are important, they matter. They make our lives more interesting, they aid the search for truth but our common humanity matters more. Those simple values.

Every issue that comes up, that I’m asked what’s my opinion on: social security reform, bankruptcy bills, the budget, education, some development in foreign policy. Every issue, I put through that prism. I ask myself, “Will this course help us to move from interdependent to an integrated community? Will this course reinforce shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared values?” If the answer is yes, I’m for it. If the answer is no, I’m not. And it helps me to think about that.

So what I want to say to all of you is, you don’t have to agree with what I just said, but if you don’t, you need to know what you think about the modern world and how you’re going to evaluate all these apparently desperate things that are happening within the United States and around the world.

I think to build a more integrated global community we essentially need to do the following things. First, we do have to have a security policy, to fight terror and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The President now has a full plate trying to deal with the, North Korea and Iran, as well as trying to make the Iraqi enterprise successful and deal with the fact that Mr. bin Laden is still at large, even though al Qaeda’s reach has been undermined by the destruction of al Qaeda cells (about 20 when I was in office and more than 20 others since 9/11). It is a problem if countries get, more and more countries get nuclear weapons. Not so much because they’re likely to drop bombs on other countries, but because every time another country gets a nuclear weapon and says it, then somebody else thinks they have to have one. And the more of this material you have lying around the more vulnerable it is to be stolen or sold to terrorist organizations who can make small bombs out of it that they wouldn’t hesitate to use.

If you remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he did that with a simple fertilizer bomb. You can get on the Internet and figure out how to build that bomb. Every one of you can. If you can afford a pickup truck and you can go buy fertilizer, you can make the same bomb that blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. But if you have a Girl Scout cookie’s worth of fissile material and you put it in that bomb and you know how to detonate it, you could take out 25% of Washington, DC. So the reason you should be concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons, or biological weapons, or chemical weapons is that we have to worry about where these supplies will go and if they go to terrorist groups that aren’t countries, that don’t have targets, that aren’t easy to retaliate against, they’re more likely to be used. So we need a security system. But we can’t possibly kill, jail or occupy every adversary we have and every potential adversary we have.

If you live in global interdependent world, you can’t get rid of all your enemies. And there’s where politics comes in. Sooner or later, you have to make a deal. You have to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. And that means we have to share the load of fighting poverty, fighting AIDS, dealing with the fact that 130 million kids never go to school; dealing with the fact that one in four people don’t have access to clean water; dealing with the fact that climate change has already begun to disrupt the economies and societies of many places throughout the world. So we need more cooperation.

The third thing we need is more institutional ways of expressing our cooperation. We need to strengthen the UN, not abandon it. We need to strengthen the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, not abandon it. I think we shouldn’t have abandoned the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, even though it wasn’t perfect. It helps us to work with other counties to reduce the threat of global warming. I think that we should not have abandoned the International Criminal Court against war criminals. The American soldiers were completely protected under the way we finally got it written in 2000. That’s what I think.

I think it’s a mistake for America now to be doing research again into whether we should develop two new kinds of nuclear weapons. One small one to break deep underground concrete bunkers. We already do that with a conventional weapon. And one that might be used on the battlefield. We say, “Well, we may not use it.” For the first time in American history, in the last four years For the first time since the bomb was dropped ending War World II in Japan, the United States government has said we are looking into developing smaller scale nuclear weapons, which we might use first. Now how can we say to Iran, or to North Korea, or any of these other countries, “You can’t have a nuclear weapon,” when we’re trying to develop new ones? Everybody understands why we have the ones we have and we’ve been reducing our stocks with Russia rather dramatically and we can continue that.

So with a straight face, we can try to contain the spread the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons with what we’ve got, because we’re reducing it, but not if we develop new ones. And might add, since we’re out here in California, your Senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein, has been the most vocal member of the United States Senate in either party in campaigning against the research and the development of new nuclear weapons and I think she’s absolutely right about it, and I hope all of you will support her in it. It is not necessary for our security. But the point is we need-- We have to cooperative.

Let me give you a couple of other examples. Whether you agree or disagree with what we did in Iraq and launching a preemptive attack on Saddam Hussein, I think two things are now clear. Number one, all Americans and people who love freedom throughout the world have a stake in their succeeding, because 58% of them showed up to vote, a lot of them under threat of death and we were all moved by that purple ink on the fingers of the Iraqis. It became a symbol of devotion to freedom and self-governance.

The second thing is that this is not something we can do every day. That whether you agree or disagree, it can’t become the primary mode by which we solve problems because we’ve already spent $200 billion dollars there. We’re going to wind up spending more than we did in World War I in inflation-adjusted dollars.

We have men and women of the National Guard and Reserves have been taken over there and held a long time, many of them have lost their livelihoods back home. It’s put the military resources of the country under great stress. You just can’t up and do this every time something is going on in the world you don’t like. That’s why President Bush recently said that he wanted to support the British and the Germans and the French in their diplomatic effort to try to get Iran not to develop a nuclear weapon. That’s why he’s working so hard to get China to help solve the North Korean nuclear problem. That’s why we need NATO in Afghanistan, where we only have 20,000 troops and where all the trouble really started for us, with al Qaeda.

There are 40,000 troops in Afghanistan now because NATO is providing half of them and if they weren’t, our whole enterprise there would be in peril. We probably don’t have enough troops there as it is, but we-- We and the President there, Mr. Karzai are in as good of shape as they’re in because of cooperation. It’s not something we can just do all the time. Most of the time we’re going to have to work with other people in some sort of framework of cooperation.

The fourth point I want to make is if we want to live in a more integrated world, we have to make the United States a better model for that kind of world. We have to keep making America better, a place where there are more shared responsibilities and shared benefits based on shared values. We can’t afford to be as divided as we now are over so many things. And I’ll just give you one example that’s my pet peeve.

I think it was a mistake for us to cut taxes four times and go back to big deficits in the middle of a military conflict for the first time in the history of the Republic and to give half of the money to people in the top 1% of the income group, including a lot of people in this room. I think it’s a mistake. [APPLAUSE] It violates the principles of shared responsibilities for one thing. Let’s just start there.

I’ve got a college roommate who was (when we graduated from college in the 1960’s) a pilot in the Marine Corp. He has two sons. We’ve been like brothers ever since we lived together four years in college. I grew up in a Democratic family thinking that Civil Rights was the most important issue. He was raised in a conservative Republican Irish-Catholic family believing that rolling back communism was the most important issue, and we’ve been like brothers for 40 years now. And he has two sons. Both of them served in the Marine Corp and they were in the theater in Afghanistan and Iraq. They both could have given their lives for our country. My roommate doesn’t make near as much money as I do. He’s a pilot, a commercial pilot. It bothers me that his kids were in danger wearing the uniform of this country in a struggle against global terrorism and I was not asked to contribute one red cent to support their sacrifice. All they asked me to do was to open four envelopes containing my tax cuts. For the first time in American history, I was-- people in my income group were given a total free ride and are supposed to stand up here and spout patriotic slogans and not being asked to do a single thing. [APPLAUSE, WHISTLES] That bothers me.

Now, parenthetically, I think it’s also terrible economics. We’ve gone to big deficits. We’ve got, last year, a $400 billion dollar deficit, which was really a $550 billion dollar deficit and I want, just to make sure all you know what happens when you run a government deficit. You know, I was, I suppose-- One of my liberal critics said, when I was President, that I was the most conservative Democratic on fiscal matters since Grover Cleveland [FEW LAUGHS] and I think he thought it was an attack. I personally wore it as a badge of honor because I don’t believe in a global economy you can be socially liberal or progressive unless you’re fiscally responsible, because otherwise you’re spending all your money paying interest on the debt. And you take middle class people’s taxes and turn around and give it to wealthy bondholders. But basically when you run a deficit and you spend money, you’ve got to borrow the money from somebody. Right?

Well, here’s how we finance the deficit. The first thing we do is we take the $150 billion dollars every year that people who are paying Social Security taxes pay that we’re not paying out to beneficiaries. We take it right off the top and give it to me in tax cuts and other government expenditures. And the government puts a little chip, a little IOU, in the Social Security Trust Fund. Now it’ll get paid back, don't worry about that. It will be paid back. But someday it’ll be paid back by ordinary taxpayers’ money being put back in the Social Security Trust Fund to pay back 25 years from now so some person can get their Social Security check, money they gave me today. But it’s not enough, because we still had $400 billion dollars more we had to borrow last year, on top of the $600 billion dollars we had to borrow to finance our trade deficit.

So every day, the United States government goes into the international currency markets and sells our debt at interest primarily to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia. And their theory is that all these countries have got a bunch of money in the bank and they have to buy our debt. They have to fund out choices to spend more than we take in, because if they don’t our currency will collapse, our interest rates will explode and we can’t buy their exports anymore. So we can get away with behaving in a way no other country in the world can.

I mean if Mexico or Brazil had our budget policy, they’d last about a nanosecond, [LAUGHS] before their currency would collapse and they’d be out of business. If they did it the way we did do, they’d be history. But we have a vibrant, strong private sector. We have a reputation for repaying our debts. The truth is they want Americans to keep running up debt on our credit cards buying imports from other countries so they buy our debt, because if they buy our debt at reasonable interest rates, the dollar doesn’t collapse and interest rates don’t explode and we don’t all go broke. But you need to know that. Every day, you’re dependent on

Last week, did you see the South Koreans just sort of had second thoughts about buying our debt and the value of the dollar plummeted and they had to run back the next day and say, “No, no, no. We’ll keep buying it.” [LAUGHS] Now the problem is the people who have propagated this economic theory in the 1980’s, and again now, they just believe that these people are going to buy our stuff forever and that we are the only country in the world that can essentially practice institutional irresponsibility for the benefit of those of us who want lots of government and don’t want to pay for it. And I just don’t believe that. All these countries are going to have more and more customers. They’re going to have other problems that come up for themselves from time to time and there will be a reckoning. There’s a longer lead-time between our misbehavior and having to pay for it, than for any other country on earth but sooner or later, it’ll happen. And all-- Building back in institutional deficits to fund tax cuts when we already had the lowest tax burden of any advanced country in the world and to throw them primarily at people at the upper income scale, that cannot possibly spawn enough economic growth through reinvestment is a, I think, a disservice. It does not create a world of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. It promotes concentrated wealth, uneven benefits and grossly uneven responsibilities. So that’s why I’m against it.

You can disagree with me but you have to ask yourself why you think it’s okay for a country like China, with a per capita income of (depending on how you measure it) somewhere between $1,300 and $5,000 a year, to fund millionaires’ tax cuts in America. You just have to ask yourself why you think that’s a good policy for us to borrow money from them, so our children will have to pay it back with interest to pay for my tax cut today. When I already live in a country with the lowest aggregate tax burden of any advanced country on earth and when none of my investment decisions are affected by the changes in the tax rates. So that’s what I think. You don’t have to agree with me but you have to ask yourself if you don’t agree, why you think that this program has contributed to an America that’s coming together instead of an America that’s coming apart.

The last thing I want to say is, whether you agree or disagree with any particular government that’s in power, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, or a Republican or a Democrat, you should feel hopeful because you have more power as a citizen today than ever before and there’s something you can do, for three reasons. One is in the 1990’s, for the first time in all human history, more people lived under governments they voted in than lived under dictatorships. So what you’ve seen lately in the growth of democracy is an acceleration of what began in earnest with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s the first time in history more than half the people lived in democracies.

Number two, the people who live in democracies have more power than ever before through the growth of something called Non-Governmental Organizations (or NGOs in the common parlance) and that’s all the foundations you read about. From the biggest and richest in the world, Bill Gates, who’s done wonderful work in Africa and India on healthcare, to little bitty ones in rural India, like the Self-Employed Women’s Association, that takes village women and makes small loans to them and gives them a chance to make a living and everything in between.

In this tsunami disaster, the American people gave a staggering $700 million dollars. A third of households in America contributed and they gave most money through UNICEF, the Red Cross, Oxfam, all these things. These are the NGOs. They’re making a big difference.

The third reason you should feel hopeful is there’s more direct citizen power than at any time in recent history because of the Internet. Over half of these small contributions that were given for tsunami relief were given over the Internet. In the recent Presidential campaign-- 50 years from now, when people look back on it, the most important characteristic from a political science point of view is that the 2004 campaign was the first campaign since money became important in paying for advertising, where small donors in both parties had a decisive impact because of the Internet. Because they could aggregate their small amounts and have a bigger impact than the big money that was given.

Do you remember when the SARS epidemic happened a few years ago? It started in Hong Kong, it’s a part China, the Chinese government’s initial instinct was to deny the problem. They were worried it would kill travel to Hong Kong, tourism, investment. There was a citizen revolt in China over the Internet telling the truth about the disease. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people emailing, banging on the doors of China’s government, and they turned on a dime. Within a matter of a week, they had a responsible position on SARS. They were working with the rest of the world and we shut down what could have been a deadly epidemic. Why? Because of people using citizen power. You should be optimistic about that.

You should also be optimistic because the whole story of human history basically, since people came out of caves and clans, and first rose up on the African Savanna over 100,000 years ago, has been a story of moving from isolation to interdependence, where there’s both cooperation and conflict to integrated communities and we have continued to do it. We nearly destroyed ourselves in the 20th Century with two World Wars, nuclear weaponry, slaughters in the Holocaust in China and the former Soviet Union but we kept on going. And terrorism is troublesome. Weapons of mass destruction are troublesome, but I think it is unlikely that the 21st Century will come as close to the preface of self-destruction as the 20th Century did. I think it is far more likely that it will be a time of unprecedented global cooperation, prosperity and peace and I think we’ll do it because we don’t have any other choice. So that’s why I look at the issues the way I do. Again, you don’t have to agree with me but should figure out how you view these things and you should be optimistic. People have a way of stumbling in the right direction.

In World War II, it was two years after the Nazis invaded Poland that we finally entered the war, after Pearl Harbor. In those two years it was awful for the British and the forces of freedom on the continent. They went forever and didn’t win any battles and the press kept taunting Winston Churchill about it, about America not being there and they didn’t really know all the things Roosevelt was trying to do to help them. And they just kept taunting him about America not being in the war. And finally one day, in the midst of all that destruction and facing the loss of everything, Churchill looked at the reporters and smiled and he said, “You know, the United States of America always does the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative.” [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE] We may still have some alternatives to exhaust, not only in our country but in the world. But on the balance, it would be a mistake to bet against the future. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

DENNIS THELEN: This really has been our honor, hasn’t it? [APPLAUSE] We have four or five questions that have been prepared for Mr. Clinton to respond to. And I’ll start with one that I think he might enjoy perhaps the most. Mr. Clinton, do you believe the 26th Amendment of the Constitution, limiting a President to two terms should be changed? [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE, CHEERS]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think it’s the 22nd Amendment. Isn’t it? [LAUGHS] I think the 26th is the one that talks about how they could have stopped me from being President if I had become incapacitated, [LAUGHS] which some of my opponents thought was the case from the day I took office. [LAUGHS] But anyway

The two-term rule was put in by the Republican Congress, who voted it out and then sent it to the States and the States ratified it, after President Roosevelt died so suddenly, after his fourth Inauguration, a month after he was sworn in for his fourth term. And it was obvious that he was desperately ill when he was running for reelection the fourth time and the public didn’t know about it. None of that could happen now.

On the other hand, George Washington established the two-term precedent, which was so strong until World War II, that Roosevelt’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, didn’t run for a second term, because he had become President upon the assassination of President McKinley barely a couple of months into McKinley’s term, so TR had had almost two full terms, even though he had only been elected once, and he didn’t want to violate George Washington’s precedent. So I think, on the whole, a President should not serve more than two terms. But I think the prohibition probably should apply to two consecutive terms, for one reason only. [LAUGHS]

Let me tell you why. And you couldn’t fix it in time to affect me. It won’t affect me at all, so I Let’s take this out. [LAUGHS] My view is that at some-- With people living longer and longer and various Presidents having skills in some areas but not others, that are extraordinary, there might come a time (50 years in the future or something) when someone serves two terms, goes out and is out for 8, 12, maybe even 20 years. As long as people are living and functioning today, it will happen more. And the country will have a repeat of a certain kind of problem and they’d want to call a President back. I don’t know why the voters shouldn’t have the right to do that. And so but-- I don’t think I don’t say this because of any, because of myself, because I don’t think there’s any way in the wide world any of these changes could ever affect me, but I think that the two-term limit on the whole does more good than harm and I think we ought to keep it. But we maybe ought to make it consecutive in the event that some day the American people will want to call some President back to office for a very specific reason. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible, once you lay out to get elected again because there’s too many other people that want the job. [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE]

DENNIS THELEN: Some wanted to know if a certain Senator from New York would have, would want to weigh-in on that issue. But in any event, the second question for Mr. Clinton. What would you rank as the most memorable or lasting achievement of your two Presidential terms?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think there were two. First of all, I think the fact that we were able to restore broad-based prosperity, in which we had 50% more jobs than the previous 12 years but 100 times as many people moved out of poverty was important. That if we, the sense I think we restored a sense of possibility to America and a sense of fairness and opportunity for all people and I think that was That really mattered to some of us. [APPLAUSE]

The other thing that I think was an important, but no so much a single achievement, but I think if you look at what we did in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, the Balkans and all these places in the world. People thought America was on their side and I think that’s what you want. We’re going through a period of time (it can’t possibly last forever), when we were the overwhelmingly dominant country in the world (militarily, politically and economically). You want people to think that America is pulling for them. Even when they disagree with specific things that we do, you want them to feel that basically we’re pulling for them. We want them to be a part of our future, and I think most people felt that way when I was President and around the world. And I felt good about it. I think it was important. [APPLAUSE]

DENNIS THELEN: One more prepared question for Mr. Clinton. And that is do you expect that Osama bin Laden will be captured or killed?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Sure. [LAUGHS] I do. I think-- We apparently had one chance to get him at Tora Bora early in the conflict. But you know, he’s very smart and apparently he’s been able to get enough medical treatment for his rather severe health problems that he’s able to survive probably somewhere along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in those hills. But I do think that he will be captured or killed. You know, we have 20,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and 147 in Iraq so it’s-- It would have taken to get him by now, it would have taken a level of commitment that was not made, except if we’d gone to Tora Bora, when we thought he was there, early. But they--

A lot of this work in the fight against terror is done by people you don’t know and will never see, and I think that’s important and that you should all understand this. 9/11 was traumatizing for us. But there were people on the case before 9/11, for years, who knew that he was the number one terrorist threat in the world. If you heard Richard Clark’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission. He was the principal anti-terror person for me and then he worked for former President Bush, former President Reagan and he stayed on in the current Bush administration for a while. You know, he was very moving to me. He’s just one of literally hundreds of people in law enforcement, and intelligent services and others who are out there working on this every day. There are people being arrested every day and cells be taken down every day that don’t make the headlines, that make us a lot of safer. And eventually they’ll figure out where he is and how to get to him. So yes, I think he will be captured or killed, unless he dies first from his health problem.