Given on September 12, 2005. Transcribed by Reg.

Thank you very much. It's great to be with you and thank you so much for that kind introduction, Dave, and for that warm welcome. Well,I'm very happy to be here.
I came in from Amsterdam at noon on a business meeting and I drove down from New York City this evening. And, I was in Amsterdam yesterday on business and people were, - we were all reflecting on the fact that it's been four years since the terrible events of September (pause) 11th. Four years. My Dutch friends, my Israeli friends that I was there for a business meeting with were all (in audible). And they were all expressing concern for our country, especially in the aftermath of the hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast and what seems to have been a discoordinated, uncoordinated, ineffective, slow, bewildering lack of responsiveness, which still hasn't been sorted out. But it created an image abroad of an America that somehow have lost the expertise and the leadership and the power to take care of its own people and to deal with its own future.
I want to take a few minutes tonight and I want to reflect on where we've been since 9/11, and I want to talk about it in the context of a report card if you'll accept that at the start of a college semester and talk about how we fix where we are. I know you all are talking about the Constitution and you want to talk about the Patriot Act and so forth and I think it's integrally connected to our war on terror and I hope you'll bear with me when I offer some of these thoughts.
You know it reminds me of a story - I came up here to talk about - it reminds me of a story of a city man whose car broke down while he was driving through ranch country in Texas. He was puttering around underneath the car, he'd heard it making some noises, and he heard a deep voice from off to the side saying, (deep voice) "it's the transmission." The man got out from under the car and looked around for help and the only thing in sight was an old white horse standing in a nearby fence. "What did you say?" the man asked. "I said it's the transmission," replied the horse. Terrified, the man ran down the road on foot. He staggered into a country gas station, poured out his story to a couple of old timers who were playing checkers. "Wait, wait, wait a minute," someone said, one of the men, he said, "Was this about two miles out on the south side of the road?" The guy nodded. "A boney old white horse with a bob tail?" "Yeah, that's the one," the man panted. The two old timers chuckled, looked at each other knowingly and nodded their heads. "Son," one of them said, "don't pay any attention to him at all. That horse doesn't know anything about transmissions."
(Laughter.)
Well, I've done a little bit on problem of terrorism, but we're all kind of in a position of not knowing enough about the problem. And so, lets go through it and kind of see where we are, what needs to be done, and then I'd love to get some of your thoughts on it.
First of all, lets recognize all the good work that's been done, and a lot of good work has been done. It's been four years. We've not been struck by terrorists again. We weren't bankrupted. The civil aviation industry hasn't collapsed, although it's changed (inaudible). But the Western economy is still rockin' and rollin' along. In fact some people say it's better than ever. We broke up numerous terrorist plots all around the world, some in the United States, and we've done it with increased intelligence and security cooperation with other nations - nations you wouldn't even expect, like France. Believe it or not they're actually sharing intelligence with us and helping us go after some of the terrorists. We got rid of the base area of the Taliban were holding for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And so, we changed the government there, we've got Hamid Karzai in charge. He's a courageous man. He is trying to put together a government there. And there's still some Taliban there but they don't have the free run of the country like they used to have. Libya, one of our old cold-war adversaries, a state that did conduct terrorism, has basically turned over a new leaf. They've given up their pretensions to nuclear power, turned in all their equipment and their fissile material to the United States, fessed up on where they got it. All they want now is some oil equipment so they can cash in on the oil boom. And so, that's clearly a step in the right direction. The top leadership of Al Qaeda has been disrupted. So, we don't have the number 1 and 2 people yet, but got rid of most of the top 10, as we know it. We've got them on the run. We know they're having difficulties communicating. There's no more - they're not making any more cell phone calls on Inwar stat (sp?) that they used to do with impunity. But then again, that's because somebody said we were monitoring it. So - But we know we've made it tough on Al Qaeda. And the Congress passed the Patriot Act to give more authority to our law enforcement agencies and encourage them to take action to strengthen security for us. We created a new Department of Homeland Security. Airport security has been tightened up. More containers are being inspected than ever. We're putting newer technology in the field in an effort to (inaudible). We've distributed tons of money to state and local first responders. We're working in states and localities, at ports, in cities - all to strengthen homeland security. The administration would be the first one to tell you that they've done a lot for a lot of money - more than doubled the amount of money that was going to this area. So, that's a lot that's been done. In addition, we've changed the intelligence system at least we've changed the top leadership. We created a Director of National Intelligence, put the CIA Director under him, made him report directly to the President. We're not quite sure how all that's going to work out, but it is an effort to get a tighter grip on the differences between the intelligence agencies. And a lot of people think that's progress.
So as you add all this up, then, is that it? Have we done enough? Do we say, we did all this and we haven't been struck? I don't think so. In fact, I'm not even sure we're winning this war on terrorism, four years later. See, the number of terrorist incidents worldwide has actually increased since 9?11. Some of these are the incidents that you read about in the newspaper, like the terrorist strikes in London in July, or the strikes in 2003 in Saudi Arabia, and the bombing of the subway system in Madrid, but some of them are the strikes that you don't read about. They're in Nepal. They're in Bangladesh. They're in Sri Lanka. They're all over. It's the consolidation of the terrorist effort in places like Indonesia. Osama Bin Ladin and Zawahiri, the #2 guy, are still loose. They're still the moral force, and maybe even the organizing force behind many of these incidents. Musharraf claims great progress in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Northwest frontier area is essentially still out of government control and we know there's still Taliban forces in there who are striking our forces. Because we've lost more troops in Pakistan over the last three months, excuse me, in Afghanisan, next to Pakistan over the last three months than we have in the entire time since 9/11. So, we've got a tough fight that's going on there. And Afghanistan is still in difficulty, because not only are they being attacked by people who are harbored by Pakistan but now China and Russia have come together to call for us to leave Afghanistan. They're no longer our allies in this. They put out the call. Now, the way it works is that once you put out the call like this, in a few months we'll find the Taliban armed with newer weapons - things like anti-aircraft missiles to (inaudible) our helicopters, we'll find they have new uniforms, we'll find they have night-vision sights. And we'll be asking, where did all that come from? And the answer will be obvious. They may not have Chinese makings or Russian markings on the equipment, because that stuff is available on the international arms market. But you can bet that when these countries give a call to action it's not going to be just empty words. They're going to push and they're going to shove, and they're going to bump us. They want to get us out of Afghanistan. We, after all, did that to the Soviets, and we were quite effective. President Bush said we had to keep the worst weapons out of the hands of the worst people, but the truth is that other than Libya we haven't done very much on weapons of Mass destruction. North Korea got the word they were considered part of the Axis of Evil so they can produce nuclear weapons and just to make sure they announced that they had the nuclear weapons and they've still got them. And North Korea is sort of a one product country. It doesn't export wheat. It doesn't export oil. It doesn't export video games or flat-screens. It exports weapons and military technology. That's what it's good at. So, they're building to their strength, and they're a nuclear power right now. Iran, you may have seen in the newspaper over the weekend, once again the new hardline government has said they will not cease and desist their nuclear activities. Now they're sort of daring us on what we're going to do. And we know that even in Russia we're actually, if we're going to look at where the threat of terrorists getting nuclear materials is, it's mostly in Russia, because that's where most of the highly enriched uranium is. It's not under strong control. It's not well guarded in every case. And for a decade we had a program that runs between 6 hundred million and a billion dollars a year to strengthen control of that material and try to buy it up and then bring it back to the States and degrade it. The truth is that this administration hasn't done much to accelerate that. In fact when it comes to using international law, the administration has done worse than nothing. They had the five year nuclear review conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. And the United States, which should have lead the effort, had no new proposals, sent a very junior diplomat up to it, and the conference resulted in no progress at all. When we should be bringing and preparing to bring legal sanctions against countries like Iran, who are going to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Instead we don't have the leadership anymore.
Terrorist recruiting is strong. The CIA recently testified that what's happening as a result of Iraq is terrorists are actually being created by the images of US soldiers fighting in Iraq. They're enraged by this, and this is a recruiting magnet. Iraq is like a feedlot for terrorists. They come there. They don't know much. They get some training. They get to put there hands on the weapons. They get to shoot at American soldiers. They find out how to shoot to survive. Some of them do suicide bombings, but many of them are being trained there, blooded, if you like that word, proving their fitness on the bar of these Americans, and then they'll be sent back into Europe, or Asia, or into Africa, or somewhere else to do their work later on. And it's also true that we've had problems (inaudible) in Iraq. The president said we were going into Iraq to get rid of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, because they might end up in terrorist hands. The truth has been that the Iraqis didn't have weapons of Mass Destruction. There are terrorists in Iraq now, but they really weren't there before we went there. They're coming in to attack us in Iraq. And so the missions has gotten increasingly difficult to justify and explain and support. It's a difficult dilemma. It was a war that we didn't have to fight, but now that we're there, if we don't get out of it right away, we'll increase that risks and the odds against us. And it's lead to a great loss of legitimacy for the United States in the world. It's not just the Germans and the French. It's throughout much of the world. People look at us and they see a country that's too quick to use force and doesn't listen and communicate well with it's neighbors.
So, if you add all this up, after four years, 200 billion dollars, 2000 American lives lost plus, two ongoing military conflicts, our military totally committed, at least the ground forces, totally committed, no spare capacity, you have to ask yourself: Are we going the right way? I think we have the right to expect more of the government. I think we have the right to expect more of the leadership. This is no time to stay the course in the war on terror. If we want to succeed in protecting America, we've got to change the course in the War on terror.
(Applause)
I don't want to give a partisan speech. If you want to hear a partisan speech, I'll be speaking on behalf of John Corzine at some point. (laughter) This is not a partisan- I'm trying be like, I'm trying to be a better horse who really knows transmissions. (laughter) (inaudible)
(to be continued)