*EPF402 10/14/2004
Excerpt: Powell Says War on Terrorism Only Part of U.S. Security Policy
(Says encouraging trade is also part of the policy equation) (4140)

Secretary of State Colin Powell says U.S. national security policy brings together critical policy elements, including fighting poverty and disease, dealing with enemies where they exist, and encouraging trade.

Speaking at the Italian Embassy in Washington October 13, Powell said the United States is working with its partners on every continent so that terrorists "now have fewer opportunities to launch major deadly strikes." Today, he said, terrorists have fewer places to run and hide or launch deadly attacks.

Powell said "every day terrorists have fewer silent helpers ... more outspoken adversaries, [and] more brave nations and individuals willing to stand up to them willing to confront the savagery and the hatred and nihilism that define terrorism."

Daily, he said, the United States works with its friends and allies in the Middle East and beyond "to advance reforms that will eliminate the frustration, the injustice, the poverty, [and] the despair that gives rise to ideas of mass destruction."

Delivering the keynote address at the 60th anniversary dinner of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Powell said, "We understand the policy logic of encouraging good governance, of poverty alleviation, of fighting disease -- so that societies won't stagnate or implode, so states won't fail."

Working to spread liberty and democracy is not merely a matter of idealism, Powell said, but an issue of "enlightened self-interest." He said the Millennium Challenge Account has money to distribute to countries that "have made a commitment to democracy, the rule of law, the end of corruption, the dignity of the individual, [and] human rights." Nations that pursue that path "will find America standing there to help them with education ... infrastructure development ... [and] the means of attracting trade," he said.

Powell, who is the recipient of The Johns Hopkins University President's Medal, said the success of U.S. leadership depends not only on partnerships with nations but also with international institutions. He also said the United States treasures its strong alliances around the world.

The secretary acknowledged continuing proliferation challenges in places such as North Korea and Iran, but he said "every day we get closer to staunching the proliferation and transfer" of weapons and technology. "We are going after the proliferators. We are dealing with the cases of weapons of mass destruction wherever they might be found," he added.

Powell also pointed to the recent successful election in Afghanistan, where Afghans went to the polls to decide "who was going to be in charge of their future." That election demonstrated "that the tyranny of the Taliban was over and the promise of the ballot box had arrived in Afghanistan," he said.

The secretary said the same thing can occur in Iraq. "Things are changing. Najaf and Samara are back in the hands of the interim Iraqi government," he said, and Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is talking about reconciliation. At the same time, he said, the coherence of the insurgency is weakening in Fallujah.

"So we're going to press ahead to [Iraqi] national elections in January of 2005," Powell said, "just like we did in Afghanistan.

"We do this for their sake ... [and] for our own," he added, "because if we make this work -- and we will make it work -- we will have an entirely new image in that part of the world."

Powell also talked about the hard work that is under way to solve regional crises in places like Sudan and Haiti. He described Haiti as "one of the more challenging areas in which we have to work."

Following are excerpts of Powell's remarks:

(begin excerpt)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman

October 14, 2004

REMARKS

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Recipient of The Johns Hopkins University President's Medal, Keynote Address of the 60th Anniversary Dinner of the School of Advanced International Studies [SAIS] The Johns Hopkins University

October 13, 2004

Embassy of Italy
Washington, D.C.

(7:00 p.m. EDT)

SECRETARY POWELL: In the past dozen years the world has changed so dramatically. And on September 11, 2001, that pulse of change took on a particular shape -- a shape that defines the principal security challenge of our time. Terrorism and the war on terrorism is this administration's number one priority, and will remain so for as long as necessary. We've tried our very best to understand the change, and as this change has come upon us, to understand the implications of 9/11, and we think we do.

As the President has emphasized from the very start, this unprecedented struggle against terrorism has its military as well as its non-military dimensions, and using all the tools at our disposal, it is a challenge, it is a war, it is a conflict that has to be fought to a successful and a complete conclusion. Terrorists must be attacked. They must be destroyed. They cannot just be contained. Their sanctuaries and means of support must be eliminated, not just limited.

And that's what we're doing. That's what this administration, and all the assets at our disposal and all of the allies who are working with us, are doing. Every day we are working to improve our ability to go after the enemy, to protect our country, to control our borders, to know who's coming here, to make sure that we have a sense of who's coming into our country and for what purpose.

But at the same time that I work with [Homeland Security Secretary] Tom Ridge to make sure we are protecting our borders, we have to do it in a way that keeps our borders open. We want youngsters to come here and go to SAIS. We want people to come to our great hospitals. We want people to come to our entertainment facilities. We want secure borders but we want open doors because, as was touched on by Bill earlier, we are an immigrant nation; we are a nation that is touched by every nation in the world and we, in turn, touch every nation in the world. It is our openness, it is our welcoming attitude, that makes us what we are. It's reasonable for us to protect ourselves, but at the same time important for the world to know that we are a welcoming nation, a welcoming people.

Every day as we go about this conflict, as we go about resolving this conflict, we work to strengthen our international partnerships, our partnerships in law enforcement and intelligence sharing. Every day we get closer to staunching the proliferation and transfer of weapons of mass destruction, working through the President's Proliferation Security Initiative, and through the application of skilled diplomacy. We are going after the proliferators. We are dealing with the cases of weapons of mass destruction wherever they might be found -- in Iraq, or more successfully, through skilled diplomacy in Libya, and we've put Libya onto a new path to a better future for the Libyan people and removed the cause of concern.

And every day we work with friends and allies, in the Middle East and beyond. We work to advance reforms that will eliminate the frustration, the injustice, the poverty, the despair that gives rise to ideas of mass destruction. Last month, just as a small example, we launched something called the Forum for the Future at the United Nations in New York, 28 foreign ministers came together, 28 ministers from the G-8 [Group of Eight] and from the broader Middle East and North Africa, to create a partnership, to move forward with respect to reform and modernization in the broader Middle East and North Africa, not reform imposed by the United States, not telling people how to do it, but letting the people of the broader Middle East and North Africa know that in America you have a partner that wants to work with you on your reform program. What is it you think you think you need to be doing, and how can we help you? And we stand ready to help, to help promote market reforms, to help promote free trade, to help promote democracy.

By employing all of these means and working with partners on every continent, terrorists now have fewer opportunities to launch major deadly strikes. Every day terrorists have fewer places to run, fewer places in which to hide; and every day terrorists have fewer silent helpers, and more outspoken adversaries, more brave nations and individuals willing to stand up to them, willing to confront the savagery and the hatred and the nihilism that define terrorism.

Every day, we make progress in the main theaters where our military, in coalition with other nations, have been and remains engaged -- in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Just four days ago a free and fair Presidential election took place in Afghanistan, the first ever in that nation's history. The election wasn't perfect. I don't know of a county in the United States that has every had a completely open, perfect election -- (laughter) -- but the government and the opposition, with the help of the United Nations and American diplomats, will get through these little problems that emerged in the course of their election. The important thing is that they had an election. That's a sign of democracy growing. All last week and the weeks before, I heard all of these comments about, "It won't happen," "They can't have such an election," "This is something that is foreign to Afghanistan," "They have no tradition," "They don't know how to do it, it won't work, they won't get the ballots out," "You couldn't have registered 10 million people in the time that was available," "The Taliban and al-Qaida will do everything they can to make sure this does not happen," "This is a Muslim country, it won't work, it isn't applicable to their culture and to their history, it's wrong, you're going in the wrong direction, it won't work."

Yet we all woke up Sunday morning and saw pictures in our newspapers, we saw pictures on television, of Afghans lined up around and around the blocks of the polling stations. I heard stories all Sunday morning long, after speaking to [U.S.] Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, who did a great job over there and talking to other members of my staff about people who started queuing up at 3 o'clock in the morning. They told me the story about a bridge that had been blown in one of the outlying provinces across the river so that people couldn't get to the polling station. And the people came to the destroyed bridge and then they walked along the bank until they could find a ford, and then they crossed the icy water to get to a polling station.

They tell me stories of polling stations that it was time to close and it was time to end it all, and the people were still lined up around the block. They did not want to close. They wanted to vote. Thousands of people wanted to vote. Hundreds of thousands of people wanted to vote. Millions of people wanted to vote.

Three million people have come back into Afghanistan since we got rid of the Taliban three years ago -- almost four years ago, I guess, now. Three million people have come back to rebuild that country. Thousands, hundreds of thousands more, still outside of the country voted absentee in Pakistan to make sure that their voices were heard. People wanted to vote.

Why? Because they wanted to decide who their leaders would be. They wanted to decide who was going to be in charge of their future. They knew that the tyranny of the Taliban was over and the promise of the ballot box had arrived in Afghanistan, all of this in just a few years. We and our coalition partners in the International Security Assistance Force have helped them, and we should be proud. President Karzai, the Interim President of Afghanistan, and his leaders should be proud. Our young men and women who fought and the families of those who lost their lives in Afghanistan should be proud. Our coalition partners who have stood strongly with us should be proud of this remarkable achievement, an achievement that I am confident will be repeated next spring when they elect a new parliament. Afghanistan is a better place for what we have done and for what the people have done for themselves.

There is no reason that we cannot do the same thing in Iraq. We are facing a difficult time in Iraq. There's no point in saying it is not the case. We are fighting an insurgency. That insurgency is led by people who want to go back to the past, who want to go back to extermination pits, they want to go back to gassing their friends and neighbors, they want to go back to tyranny. The people of Iraq don't want that any more than the people of Afghanistan wanted it. Terrorists are coming to make trouble. They will be dealt with. Our coalition partners and an increasingly effective Iraq security force under the leadership of Prime Minister Allawi and the other brave Iraqi leaders who every day get up and face death at the hands of these individuals, but they get up and they go out and do the job because they know the Iraqi people deserve a better life, they deserve the same hope and future that we are giving to the people of Afghanistan.

Things are changing. Najaf and Samara are back in the hands of the Interim Iraqi Government. Muqtada al-Sadr, who made such difficulties for all of us a few weeks ago, is now talking of reconciliation. Weapons are being turned in in Sadr City. The Iraqi Interim Government and the coalition are working to recapture the other towns in the Sunni Triangle that are not fully under government control. Coherence of the insurgency in Fallujah is weakening. You've read about it in today's papers. Soon this and other parts of Iraq that suffer the intimidation of political criminals and foreign fighters will once again be in the hands of the government.

It's going to be tough. It's going to be difficult. There will be dark days ahead and brighter days will be coming. We have to stand -- we will stand -- with the courageous and dedicated Iraqi leaders, with the people of Iraq who want a better future. We will stand with our NATO colleagues who are there with us and others who are coming. Earlier today, NATO announced that they have put together this team that will be going in to help train Iraqi officers, to make them more competent, so the alliance is coming together. The UN is working to put in place more election officials so that we can have an election by the end of January 2005. The international financial institutions are coming together to help relieve the Iraqi people of the debt burden they have left over from Saddam Hussein.

So we're going to press ahead to national elections in January of 2005, just like we did in Afghanistan this past weekend. We do this for their sake, we do it for our own, because if we make this work -- and we will make it work -- we will have an entirely new image in that part of the world: democracy, freedom, people selecting their own leaders, the world coming together to help this nation back up on its own feet. We will never have another debate about weapons of mass destruction. We will not have to talk about terrorism any longer. And if there was any question about the nature of this regime, we saw the pictures on television today and you'll see more of them tomorrow of one of the mass graves uncovered up in the northern part of the country: women, pregnant women, murdered; children murdered. Who can still doubt the nature of the regime that is no longer in power and has been brought to justice? Monsters ruled and ravaged Iraq. They rule and ravage it no more.

And after the January elections, I believe it will be clearer than ever to all people that we've done the right thing. We're confident in our course because we have worked hard to understand the world that is taking shape before us. And with this administration, with President Bush, there's no mystery about what we think. Like the President himself, we in this administration say what we mean and mean what we say -- clearly and consistently.

But it is more than just about Iraq and Afghanistan. In The National Security Strategy that the President published a couple of years ago, President Bush said: "Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial strength to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank." We used to worry almost exclusively about the power of states. Today we also have to worry about the weakness of states -- states that allow or can't prevent terrorists from plotting mass murder on their soil, and states that provide the breeding ground for terrorist recruits.

This must mean that we have to do more than just fight them when they come after us. We have to do more. We have to engage with these nations to remove the causes of terrorism, to remove the hopelessness and the poverty and the despair in the lives of these individuals who might be inclined, without hope, without promise, to move in this direction.

And that's what we are doing. We are spending a great deal of our time and our energy not just in prosecuting war and reconstructing in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are doing so many other things that are often called "soft power" points and aspects of foreign policy.

We understand the policy logic of encouraging good governance, of poverty alleviation, of fighting disease -- so that societies won't stagnate or implode, so states won't fail. We understand that this is an age where what used to be considered "soft" policy has become "hard" policy in terms of putting our full resources to these issues so that we can make a difference throughout the world.

So when we work to spread liberty and democracy, we don't see it only in terms of idealism. We see that work also in terms of our own enlightened self-interest. As the President said, this strategy "reflects the union of our values as well as our national interests."

We will go after poverty where we find it. The President has doubled over the past four years the amount of money available to USAID for development assistance around the world. And on top of that, we have created one of the most innovative programs for development and poverty alleviation since the Marshall Plan. It's called the Millennium Challenge Account. It's a program the President announced in his State of the Union speech in January of 2003 and some 14 months later it was a program that was up and running with a freestanding corporation that has been given a billion dollars to get started from the Congress, identified 16 countries to use the billion dollars with, asked them for 2.5 more in this fiscal year and then $5 billion a year more beginning in 2006.

Which countries will get this money? Those developing countries that have made a commitment to democracy, the rule of law, the end of corruption, the dignity of the individual, human rights. Those countries that have selected the right path into the future will find America standing there to help them with education, to help them with infrastructure development, to help them develop the means of attracting trade and not just standing by to receive aid.

These are parts of our policies that aren't spoken about enough. The President recognized that HIV/AIDS is truly the greatest weapon of mass destruction on the face of the earth, and he acted by helping Kofi Annan set up the Global Health Fund, and then going beyond that and putting together a program of $15 billion in order to go after HIV/AIDS throughout the world.

We have concluded 12 free trade agreements with nations around the world. Ten more are on the way and we are working on regional free trade agreements and working within the WTO [World Trade Organization] to liberalize trade. Why? Because trade brings wealth to nations in need of development so that we can encourage the free flow of trade to benefit nations throughout the world.

All of these elements come together -- fighting poverty, fighting disease, encouraging trade, dealing with enemies as we find them -- all of these things come together to create a national security policy that I think is relevant to the world in which we are living.

There are many challenges that we still face. Proliferation is a problem. Iran and North Korea are problems. We are using diplomatic means and political means to try to resolve these problems. Foreign policy in the 21st century means using all of the tools at your disposal. The President's first choice is diplomacy, political action. He also knows that in order for diplomacy and politics to work, it must be backed up with strength -- our political strength, our economic strength, the strength of our military -- and we must not be afraid to act when it is necessary to do so to protect our friends and our allies, and he will not fail to act when it is so necessary.

So we are working hard around the world to solve regional crises in Africa, places such as Sudan, complete the work we started with our African partners in Liberia last year, complete the work in Haiti, which is one of the more challenging areas in which we have to work, do everything we can to get the roadmap underway so that we can finally make progress toward peace in the Middle East. There is so much to be done. There are so many challenges there. But what I see every day when I get to the office is not just challenges, but opportunities, opportunities to help this 21st century be a century of peace, a century of hope, a century where people such as the Afghans last week can decide how they will be governed, and for people such as Afghans and Iraqis and Haitians and Liberians and Sudanese and the disadvantaged and the poor throughout the world, for them to know that the United States stands ready as a partner to assist, just as we assisted the broken nations that we found on our doorstep after World War II.

It is America's destiny, it is the fate that has been given to us, to be that nation that people look to to solve the problems and challenges of the world. We like to do it with partners. The President believes in partners. We are members of strong alliances. We treasure those alliances. We do everything we can to enhance those alliances. But even in a multilateral approach, you often have to have a leader in order to make sure that the multilateral team will work, and the United States has often been that leader, and President Bush will continue to show that kind of leadership to the world.

For this kind of leadership to work, we not only need partnerships with nations around the world, we need partnerships with international institutions, and above all, we need partnerships with great institutions such as SAIS. SAIS is a farm club for the State Department. SAIS has done so much to provide the human intellectual infrastructure of national global security in the 21st century. We rely on America's prowess in higher education to provide us with men and women deeply knowledgeable about the world, capable of mature judgment, dedicated to truth and dedicated to service, service to the nation, service to humankind.

SAIS has helped provide this human infrastructure for six decades, and so I would like to close by thanking you for this award, but more importantly, thanking you and congratulating SAIS on reaching your 60th year of outstanding achievements, outstanding service to the world. And you need to keep doing it, for six decades more, and six decades more beyond that. We need you, the nation needs you. We need you, and above all, the world needs you.

Thank you for all you do for the world, for the nation. Thank you, and God bless you.

(Applause.)

(end excerpt)

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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