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| Transcript of AIPAC Speech: An honest conversation about the threats we face |
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Video of speech available here for a limited time (for non-premium members)
The fact is that the threats around the world are real,
they’re eminent, and they require us as a nation to have a serious adult
conversation about reality.
When the polish people began rebelling against communism
after the historic visit of Pope John Paul II for 9 days in June of 1979
Part of their effort was a slogan. They said two plus two equals four. I know that may seem a little strange but it
came in part from George Orwell’s “1984” in which the torturer on behalf of the
state says if we tell you two plus two equals five, it equals five and if we
tell you that two plus two equals three, it equals three. And who are you to dispute us. And the polish people said no, if you tell us
two plus two equals five, you’re lying.
And if you tell us two plus two equals three, you’re lying.
And so as a contrast between the authoritarian effort to
impose falsehood and the right of the free people to tell the truth and have an
honest opinion.
We are actually engaged in the same contest today in which
many of our elites around the world are utterly incapable of telling the truth
and utterly incapable of standing up to the truth and utterly incapable of
having the courage to confront evil no matter how obvious it is.
Just a little over a week ago the Holocaust was
remembered. And we heard words. But we need to understand the difference
between words and policies, between sentiments and action.
Because we are at a very dangerous time. I would carry you back as a former history
teacher to three other years that ended in 9.
A hundred years ago in 1909, virtually no one in Edwardian
England would have believed that the British empire was about to be shattered
that a generation of young men were about to be slaughtered, that the wealth they had accumulated over a century was about
to spent, that within a very few years the Romanov empire, the Habsburg empire,
the Wilhelmi empire would all disappear and that their world would never fully
recover from the shattering cost of the first world war.
Just seventy years ago, in May of 1939, decent people were
trying desperately to avoid the reality of Adolf Hitler. Painful to look back and to realize that
those who could see understood and in fact whether it was Winston Churchill or
a group of younger Tories, most of whom had served in World War I and knew the
horrors of war and therefore were determined to stop Hitler before he became
too successful and before he became too powerful.
The agony of 1939 of what Churchill once said was the
unnecessary war. President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt once asked him, “What should we call this war”? He said we should call this the unnecessary
war. Because no war was easier to avoid
if at any point in the 1930s the democracies had the courage to act in unison,
but they didn’t. And in fact Stanley
Baldwin lied to the British people, reassured them when he should have
frightened then, told them they were fine when they were not safe at all. And tragically ended up very popular for the
moment and so guilty that on his 90th birthday in 1945, Churchill
would not send him greetings on the grounds that millions had died because his
leadership had been such a failure.
Now go back 30 years to 1979 when the world was
teetering. It’s hard for us to remember
now. But in 1979 the Soviet Empire was
on the march- it was inevitable, it was powerful, all of our elites knew that
we had to find détente, a fancy French word meaning understanding. And everybody, conservatives wanted to have
détente where we yelled at the Russians while we lost, liberals wanted to have
détente where we hugged the Russians while we lost. But all of our elites knew that the Soviet
Empire was on the march, that our future was grim. A French intellectual wrote a book called
“The End of Democracy”. Along came one
person. Callista and I just released a
movie about him, called “Ronald
Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny”.
(Applause)
A reporter asked Reagan, “What’s your vision of the end of
the Cold War?” He said, “We win. They lose.”
(Applause)
The elites were terrified.
The entire New York Times editorial board contemplated moving to New Zealand.
(Laughter, applause)
Reagan understood something very profound. He understood first of all that the American
people tend to identify with sports and that they would understand the word we.
And they would think that we should win.
It was bold, it was radical.
(Laughter)
CBS News never did quite get it.
(Laughter)
And he understood that they would understand they and think that we win, they lose made sense.
What was astonishing about Reagan was that in consort with
Pope John Paul II and with Prime Minister Thatcher, he actually designed a
grand strategy to bring to bare economic, intellectual, political, and other
pressures in such a way that within 11 years the Soviet Empire
disappeared.
(Applause)
I site these two examples because I think in the next few
years we will make decisions that our grandchildren that will have meant that
we were once again either in 1939 or once again in 1979.
If we lack the courage to confront honestly how grave the
threats are, if we lack the courage to describe evil as evil, and if we lack
the courage to implement the policies that those threats and that evil requires
then in fact we are in 1939. But if on
the other hand, we are prepared to tell the truth and we are prepared to develop
a world wide coalition in favor of that truth then we will be even more
surprised by the speed with which those opponents collapse and the degree to
which those evil regimes disappear.
I think virtually…
(Applause)
I think in virtually every case if we are prepared to show
great strategic leadership, it could happen without firing a shot. Remember, from Estonia to Latvia to Lithuania
to Ukraine to Bielorussia to Romania to Hungary to the Czech Republic to the
Slovak Republic to Poland to East Germany to Uzbekistan to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan…all leave the Soviet Empire without firing a
shot.
(Applause)
The first key to the Reagan strategy and to the fascists
strategy and to the strategy that Pope John Paul II illustrated when he visited
Poland as we will do at the end of this month.
We’re making a movie called Nine
Days That Changed the World which we think has direct relevance to the
world that we currently live in.
In each case those great leaders believe confronting evil
head on, describing it accurately, and bringing to bare the moral authority of
a free people was the most powerful single step you could take. Now what would that mean? That would mean absolute condemnation and de-funding
of Durbin II and any future effort to organize hatred.
(Applause)
That would mean a systematic world wide campaign to bring
forth every illustration of the abuse, destruction, enslavement, and brutality
toward women which are at the heart of the extremist wing of Islam and are the
key to the Taliban.
(Applause)
That would mean moving to suspend Iran’s right to vote in the United
Nations so long as its leader wanted genocide of Isreal.
(Applause)
That would mean enforcing the disruption of gasoline
supplies until the Iranian economy broke, the Ayatollahs were ousted and a new
regime was in place without firing a shot.
(Applause)
The would mean recognizing honestly the enormous challenge
of growing in Gaza a force for peace and prosperity and freedom that was capable
of taking on Hamas and capable of defeating Hamas because as long as Hamas
dominates Gaza, there is no partner for peace.
There is only an effort for genocide and annihilation.
(Applause)
The great tragedy of the last administration was that it combined
two enormous weaknesses that were not characteristic of President Reagan or
Prime Minister Thatcher or Pope John Paul II.
One you almost certainly will agree with, the other may
shock you. The first was it was
inarticulate. That’s an enormous,
enormous disadvantage because a free society has to be able to win the moral
case that what it is doing is necessary, unavoidable, and morally
legitimate. The current administration
will not be inarticulate. There’s a
deeper challenge- a challenge that the last administration had, and a challenge
that I very much fear this administration has.
The threats we are faced with are far more catastrophic than any of our
leaders are willing to talk about. And
the challenges of unlocking those catastrophes are much harder than any of our
leaders are prepared to talk about.
The challenge of the Bush administration wasn’t that it tried
too much. It was that it underestimated
dramatically how hard this is going to be.
Fixing Pakistan,
which in some ways is the most dangerous country in the world today because
they already have probably over a hundred nuclear weapons. Fixing Pakistan is an enormous
problem. Defeating the Taliban and Al
Quada in the northwest and in Afghanistan
is an enormous problem. Stopping a
determined Iranian theocracy with its secret police and its republican guards
so that they do not get nuclear weapons, they do not fund Hamas, they do not
fun Hezbollah, and they are not the leading exporters of terrorists in the
world is an enormous problem.
Recognizing that the leading funder of Suni extremism on the
planet is Saudi Arabia and
that rather than bow to the King we need a national energy policy to liberate
the United States.
(Applause)
And make no mistake, an American energy policy developing
American sources of oil, American sources of natural gas, American sources of
coal, American sources of hydrogen, American sources of biofuels, American sources
of solar, of nuclear, and of wind. An
all point system to maximize American freedom from the Middle
East would be the most powerful national security policy.
(Applause)
It was the deliberate driving down of the price of oil which
bankrupted Gorbachev and the Soviet Union and
if we made the same strategy of deliberately driving down the price of oil the
Iranians would presently not have the money to subsidize terrorism around the
world.
(Applause)
Let me take just a minute to talk about the scale of the
catastrophes and I want to do this, you know, I actively got involved when I was
very young. My Dad was a career soldier,
an infantryman in the US Army in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. I grew up traveling around the world. I was born in Harrisburg, PA. And we were stationed in Orleans, France
when I was a freshman in high school. We
were living in a country that had been badly damaged in World War I, bombed in
World War II, was losing the war in Algeria, lost the war in South Vietnam, or
Indochina as it was then called.
They had a hundred percent inflation. Literally the Summer
we were there the French paratroopers came to Paris, killed the fourth Republic and brought
back General de Gaul who created the fifth Republic of which President Sarkozy
is now the latest example of the most stable French government since the monarchy.
And as young kid from Pennsylvania
this was all wild. And then my Dad took
us that Spring to Verdun,
the largest battlefield of World War I.
This was a huge valley in which 600,000 French soldiers lost their lives
in a 9 month campaign. And we spent
every day touring this huge battlefield.
And we stayed every night with a friend of my Father’s who had been
drafted in 1941, sent to the Philippines, served in the Baton Death March, and
spend 3.5 years in a Japanese prison camp.
And so, I looked at this extraordinary weekend- the great
battlefields at day, the cost of defeat at night. I was going to be either a zoo director or a
vertebrate paleontologist. I love the natural
world and we were transferred that summer to Stuttgart and I literally spent the whole
summer thinking and praying about what I had experienced that weekend.
And in August of 1958 I decided to do what I’ve done ever
since. So what I’m about to say to you
is from my heart. And from everything
I’ve learning in almost 51 years. We are
on the edge of catastrophic problems. If
you get a chance, read my good friend Bill Forstchen’s novel, “One
Second After”, which describes the fate of a small town after an
electromagnetic pulse attack. This book
was inspired by a report that Congressman Roscoe Bartlett got seven nuclear
physicists of enormous experience in our nuclear weapons industry to jointly
produce.
It is based on fact, it is accurate and it’s
horrifying. And we have zero national
strategy to respond to it today.
Actually, three small nuclear weapons at the right altitude would
eliminate all electricity production in the United States, which is why I have
said publicly I favor taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their
sites.
(Applause)
We need to break the lawyer’s sophistry that all nations are
equal and we need to draw a sharp line that says if you have an evil regime and
you engage in evil things we are not going to let you fire off weapons which
could have catastrophic results.
Period.
(Applause)
The decent, the honorable, and the law abiding cannot
survive by trying to apply the same standards to the evil, the aggressive, the
criminal, and the vicious.
(Applause)
The second great threat is one or more nuclear weapons going
off either in an American city or an Israeli city or a European city or a
Japanese city. Wherever they went off,
they would have horrifying consequences.
And I strongly recommend Alex Berenson, a New York Times
reporter recently wrote a novel called The Silent Man which is about an effort
to set off a Hiroshima size weapon in the Washington, D.C. area at
the time of a State of the Union. And recognize, a Hiroshima size weapon has a radius of one
mile. There are over a hundred thousand
people in that zone. The idea that you
could stop them from driving it in in a truck is a fantasy.
This is an enormous threat to our very survival. You’ve watched the reaction to Swine
Flu. An engineered biological attack,
whether it was an engineered virus or it was an anthrax attack would have
horrifying implications and would be staggering. Now I’m not telling you these things to
frighten you. I’m telling you these for
the same reasons you tell your children to put on their seatbelts. We as a country need to develop some national
security seatbelts. And then we need to
recognize that there are some regimes that you will never be able to cut a deal
with because they are in fact evil.
(Applause)
I just want to make two last points.
(Unidentified noise)
I don’t know quite what that is but I’m going to take the
risk of saying it anyway.
(Laughter)
The first is, that talking in good faith with Adolf Hitler
and seeking reconciliation with Adolf Hitler would have been a complete dead
loser because he was in fact the personification of evil and as long as he was
in charge all humanity was at risk.
(Applause)
Ahmadinejad, if he gets the weapons will be every bit as
evil as Hitler, he tells us this all the time.
And only our unwillingness to admit that two plus two equals four blocks
us from seeing what he is doing.
(Applause)
And finally, I want you to feel very comfortable going back
home, telling all of your neighbors and your friends, you’re involved in AIPAC
because you’re involved in the largest single organization dedicated to the
survival of their children, and their grandchildren by confronting danger head
on and ensuring American safety fully as much as Israeli safety because the two
are permanently intertwined.
There is civilization and there is anti-civilization.
AIPAC personifies being committed to our children and our
grandchildren living in civilization.
And if your friends ask you why you’re involved, I hope you’ll turn to
them and say- Gosh, why aren’t you involved when it is your future for your
children and your grandchildren.
(Applause)
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