Clinton: It’s time for us to build a world without walls

Friday, May 3, 2002 | 3:03 a.m.

As part of the Barbara Greenspun Lecture Series at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, former President Bill Clinton was the featured speaker Monday night at the Thomas & Mack Center. Clinton's speech focused on the contest between the forces of integration and disintegration, as symbolized by Sept. 11, a contest that he said is far from over. The full text of his remarks follow:

I want to begin my talk tonight by asking you to think about two apparently unrelated things. First of all think about a typical day in the life of this city and this state. Nevada, the fastest growing place in America. Young, open, vibrant, a symbol of our success in an interdependent world, benefiting from the collapse of borders and distances, the globalization of travel and trade, of technology and information and growing racial and ethnic diversity -- present here and in every other successful society on Earth.

The other thing I want you to think about is what happened in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11 -- because that day was also symbolic of America's role in an increasingly interdependent world. Forces of destruction rooted in ancient religious, ethnic and political differences used global interdependence. They used open borders and open travel and accessed the technology and information for deadly ends.

What do these two apparently disparate examples tell us about the modern world? That it is highly interdependent but far from integrated. And that the great challenge of the 21st Century is to accelerate the forces of integration and harmony, and reduce the forces of disintegration and chaos.

The roots of both phenomena -- 9/11 and the amazing growth and success of this state -- are traceable to the paradoxes of the modern world. Consider the economy. In the last 20 years the global economy has lifted more people out of poverty than ever before in history. It has brought record prosperity to America over the last decade. Still, half the world's people live on less than $2 a day. A billion people live on less than a dollar a day and tonight a billion people will go to bed hungry.

In the developed world record numbers of people are going to school. During the time I was president, for the first time in history, the gap between high school graduation rates of white Americans and African-Americans virtually disappeared. College-going reached an all-time high among members of all American racial and ethnic groups. And yet, there are 125 million children on this planet of primary school age who do not go to school at all -- half the children in sub-Saharan Africa and a quarter of the children in the Indian subcontinent and a quarter of the children in the poorest countries of East Asia.

Consider the disparities and paradoxes in health. Not only have we enjoyed record life expectancy in our country and other wealthy countries but overall in the world life expectancy is up and infant mortality is down. The sequencing of the human genome has raised the very real prospect that the young women in this audience of child-bearing age will in the next five years or so be able to come home from the hospital with a newborn baby and a gene card that says, "OK, here is what your kid's life is going to be like. Here is the good news, here is the bad news, here are the following 10 things you can do that will reduce the chances of the bad news from happening by 80 percent."

When that happens life expectancy will shoot for those children above 90 years. And yet every year 10 million children in the world die of largely preventable infectious diseases. This year one of four of all the fatalities on Earth -- from everything from natural disasters and heart attacks and strokes and cancer and war and terrorism and accidents and crime -- one in four of all the deaths will come from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and infections related to diarrhea. Most of those in the last category will be little children who never got a single clean glass of water in their entire lives.

Consider the environmental paradox. This is the one we are all familiar with: The richer countries are, the better their environment tends to be, and the poorer they are the worse it tends to be. In the eight years I was privileged to serve as president, when we all enjoyed unparalleled growth, we also had cleaner air, cleaner water, safer drinking water, safer food supplies and the largest amount of land set aside in 100 years. But there is a further paradox, which is that while the prosperity of the industrial economy cleans up the environment of individual countries, it puts enormous stress on the environment of the planet as a whole. There is a severe water shortage on Earth today and it's getting worse every day. The quality of our oceans from which the vast majority of our oxygen comes is deteriorating markedly and nearly everybody now concedes that the phenomenon of global warming is real.

If the climate warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10 we will lose whole island nations in the Pacific along with much of the Florida Everglades I worked so hard to preserve and 50 feet of Manhattan Island. Even more to the point, agricultural production will be disrupted across the globe and tens of millions of more food refugees will be created, spawning many more opportunities for violence and terror.

Consider the political paradox of our time. In the last decade, for the first time in the entire history of humanity, more than half the Earth's people lived under governments of their own choosing. And increasingly, we got comfortable in successful countries with diversity, religious and racial and other diversity, and there was more and more cooperation among nations. America's chief former adversaries, Russia and China, in a host of ways began to cooperate with us. We established the World Trade Organization. The leaders in the whole Asia-Pacific region from Canada to New Zealand began to meet regularly and work together for a free-trade area. All the leaders of Democratic nations in North America and South America began to meet together and work together for a common future. NATO was expanded to include former Communist countries. America helped Mexico and Brazil with their financial difficulties. We reached out to Africa and the nations of the Caribbean to make a special effort to help them grow their economy and become closer to us and at the same time reduce the presence of narco-terrorism there.

And yet the biggest problem for the security of the modern world is high-tech terrorism rooted in ancient religious, racial and ethnic hatreds -- Osama bin Laden. We also are threatened by the relationship of terrorists to organized crime and narco-trafficking. In Colombia, the oldest democracy in South America, more than one-third of the land is now in the hands of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a leftist guerilla army known for murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking and extortion). We also had a big upsurge in ethnic cleansing, especially in the Balkans.

We worry about the use and availability of weapons of mass destruction, most predominately in the hands of both India and Pakistan as they continue to struggle over Kashmir, the dispute now over 50 years old. We see the exclusive pressing of religious and political claims in the Middle East and elsewhere. We see a rise in anti-immigration feeling among countries that have been richly benefited by immigrants. The recent election in France, where Mr. (Jean-Marie) Le Pen got into the run-off. The success of the ultra-nationalist party in Austria. Anti-immigrant candidates are doing well in Denmark and the Netherlands, places you never would have thought.

So far America has been spared that largely because of a bipartisan consensus that we are still a nation of immigrants. And I think personally that one of the best things that President Bush did after Sept. 11 was to go to a mosque and meet with Muslim leaders and tell them our enemy is not Islam, it is terror. And there is a difference. So we are dealing with a world full of paradoxes. How do we take all these things that are going on -- the things symbolized by the success of Nevada and the heartbreak of 9/11 -- and move our interdependent world to an integrated world?

I would make the following suggestions:

Before we take the liberties of Americans away, we have to first be sure we know the same thing about people who are up to no good that we know about ourselves. That requires no abridgement of liberty. But if a person has 12 houses and they just got here as an immigrant, they are either rich or up to no good. If a person has 30 credit cards and a quarter of a million dollars of debt, they are either rich or they are up to no good. And it shouldn't be too hard to find out. This is important.

We know there will be no military victory; neither side will give up and in the end, they have to share the land. The Israelis have to have security and acceptance by their neighbors as normal partners in the future. The Palestinians will have to have their state and real help in economic and social development.

The other thing we know, which was made perfectly plain by the little success we had in the last few days of working out the return of the Israeli prisoners to Israel, through the agency of American and British troops, in return for greater freedom of movement for Mr. Arafat within the Palestinian territories, is that there is no substitute for American involvement. And that may some day require us to send troops there to enforce the peace. That is what we did after Camp David in 1978. Our troops have been in the Sinai for 24 years now and most Americans don't even know it anymore. But it was worth doing.

This will be more difficult and more dangerous but if we are asked to do it, we ought to be willing to do it because there will be no peace unless we get involved and it is very important for you to understand why -- because the Israelis believe that America is the only great country that in the end when it comes to it will stand with them in fighting for their very survival. And that is true, to some extent. That is true.

And because of that the Americans are the only ones who can be taken seriously by the Israelis when we press the cause of justice and fairness for the Palestinians. There is no substitute therefore for American leadership. I strongly support Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East. I did not agree with a lot of the preliminary press reports labeling it a failure. It was the right thing to do and you can see that just a few days later, we have this little breakthrough.

After all the people who have died there, we have to start with these little steps to get to the big ones. So I ask all of you without regard to your political party to strongly support the re-engagement of the United States. If we can have a just and lasting peace in the Middle East it would be wonderful for Israel, it would be good for the Palestinians and there would be a lot less ammunition for the terrorists of the world to use in trying to pollute the minds of young people and get them to commit suicide.

Now, so those are the security issues. The second thing I want you think about is that it is important to try to stop bad things from happening. It is important to prevent and to punish if necessary. But it is not enough to build the kind of world we want for our children and our grandchildren. To do that, we will have to try to make some good things happen as well. We have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. At the end of World War II, one of our five-star generals, George Marshall, became Secretary of State and he said, "Look, we ought to take a little money and rebuild Europe." And then Gen. MacArthur said, "Yes, and Japan."

And the American taxpayers could have said, "You want to spend my money to help Germany and Japan after what they did?" Or even Britain and France could have said that -- sure they were our allies, but they could have said, "Look, they have got a well-educated work force, they will figure it out, we don't want to do it."

But I thank God about once a week for Harry Truman and George Marshall because I was born right after World War II and I grew up in a world where we never had a third world war and we won the Cold War because they took a little money to take a little trouble to build a world with more friends and fewer enemies. And we have to do that too. Let me give you a few examples.

In the economy it means we ought to do more trade. The people who protested all these meetings against globalization are right that there are a lot of problems in the world but they are dead wrong that global trade caused them. In the last two months there has been yet another study showing that the poorest countries in the world that chose to grow through open trade and investment grew at an average 5 percent a year over the last 20 years. The poor countries of the world that chose to be protectionist, to close off, to try to stay away from the world, grew at 1 percent a year.

The global economy did not cause the human misery of the world, it just won't solve it alone. But we have to have more global growth. In my last year as president, we had this sweeping bipartisan support, everybody from Jesse Helms to the Pope to Bono, for relieving the debt of the poorest nations of the world. How did we get them all together? They adapted an American proposal that we advanced in 1999 to relieve the debt of the poorest countries, but only if they put all the money into education, health and job development. And guess what? It is working. I can take the whole time up giving you a progress report, but I will just give you a couple of examples.

Honduras, a neighbor of ours, that has had a lot of political problems in the last several years, in one year went from six years to nine years of mandatory schooling, a 50 percent increase. Uganda, a country that less than 30 years ago was ruled by Idi Amin, the worst tyrant on the planet, took its savings and in one year doubled primary school enrollment and lowered the class size, something we would like to do in America, lowering class size. They did it. So without very much money, you can make a big difference. And there are lots of other things we can do.

We know how to get these 125 million kids in school. In a poor country, every single year of schooling adds on average 10 to 15 percent to annual income. So we will be making more trading partners and more responsible societies and it doesn't cost much money. Brazil pays about $15 a kid a month to the 30 percent of the poorest families in the country -- if the children go to school about 85 percent of the time. They have 97 percent enrollment. It is not rocket science. And we got in my last year as president $300 million to offer a nutritious meal to the children in the poorest countries in the world but only if they came to school to get it.

We just got the first reports and the enrollments are exploding in these countries where we are feeding the kids. Do you know how many people you can feed and how many kids you can feed a day during the whole school year for $300 million? Keep in mind, the war in Afghanistan costs a billion dollars a month and it is about as cheap as a war gets these days. It is about as inexpensive as you can do that sort of thing. So, for less than a third of that, you can feed 6 million children a meal every day of the school year for a year. It is cheaper than going to war.

I will give you another example. The U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, asked us to pony up $10 billion, the whole world, not just America. Our share will be about $2.4 billion, to fight all these infectious diseases, especially AIDS -- 40 million people in the world today have AIDS. If we don't do something to turn the trends, there will be 100 million AIDS cases by 2005. If you have 100 million AIDS cases, I promise you some of these new democracies are going to fail. And you are going to have all these young people walking around HIV positive, convinced they are going to die, more than happy to take up a gun and go fight as mercenaries and kill other people. And it doesn't have to happen.

Already the infection rates in the three southernmost countries in South Africa are at 30 percent. But there is something we can do about it. Since I am using Brazil and Uganda, I will give you two other examples. With prevention only, Uganda went from having the world's highest AIDS rate, which was 16 percent 10 years ago, to a rate half that much in five years with only prevention and education.

Brazil, which has the capacity to produce the medicine that is lifesaving for people who are HIV positive, cut the death rate in half in only three years and the hospitalization rate by 80 percent. This can be done. This is not rocket science.

And so, should we spend this money? Our share of that would be about two and one-half months of the Afghan war. But I promise you, if there are 100 million AIDS cases by 2005, we will be spending a lot more to clean up the mess. And we will be seeing a lot of young people die who could make a contribution to the world's future.

Same thing is true in the environment. There is a trillion-dollar market, a $1 trillion dollar market out there for already available clean energy technology and conservation technology with a lot more just over the horizon. But we have to do some things to activate that market. Should we do it? I think we should. I don't want 50 feet of Manhattan Island to be flooded in 50 years. I don't want to lose the Florida Everglades and I don't want millions of food refugees.

The same thing is true in politics. All of these new democracies -- they need the help. They need help to establish property systems, legal systems, copyright systems, trade laws that work. They have to know how to manage economies. I have been to so many of these countries where there is an honest president and about 10 young people working for that president. Most of them are educated in the West. They want to do the right things, but they don't have the institutions that make a country go.

You know, half the things I got credit for as president were because I not only had a great White House staff, I not only had a great cabinet and sub-cabinet, there were thousands of people there at work. And when I had to make a hard decision, by the time it came to me, hundreds of people very frequently had worked for months and months and months to try to make sure we were doing the right thing, or at least I knew what the options were. It doesn't cost much money to help other countries develop that sort of capacity.

Now, what is the problem? I want you to ask yourself this question silently. How much of the federal budget do you think we spend on foreign aid today and do you think it works? All the surveys show that Americans think we spend between 10 and 15 percent of the budget on foreign aid and they think that is way too much. We ought to spend between 3 and 5 percent, they say. I actually kind of agree with them on the 3 to 5. The problem is, we spend less than 1 percent of the budget on foreign aid. Of the 22 wealthiest countries in the world, we rank 22, dead last.

And the president has proposed that we go from $10 (billion) to $15 billion in direct assistance by 2006 or 2008 or something like that, but when we get there, that's good, that's a good start, but when we get there we'll still be 20 percent less as a percentage of our economy than we were in 1995.

I get asked all the time, "Why do people hate us around the world?" Most Americans think people hate us because we are rich and powerful. But that is not what all the international surveys show. They admire that. What they don't like is that they think we don't know enough, care enough or do enough about their situation. So, I am beating this to death up here because I am at a great university, and this is something this university could do. Las Vegas is a global city. You bring millions of people every year from other countries. When I walk through the beautiful place where I am staying, people come up and tell me where they are from.

America will never have the security we seek until people understand how little it would cost us to carry our fair share of the world's load and what a huge return we could get on a limited investment.

So, one, we need a security agenda; two, we need an agenda to make more partners and fewer terrorists. The third thing we have to do, maybe the most important of all, is really to have a broad acceptance of the idea of the global community, an integrated place, not just an interdependent place -- one routed in very simple ideas -- everybody counts, everybody has got a role to play.

We all do better when we help each other. Why? Because our differences are interesting and important, but our common humanity matters more. Now, if you think that, then the al-Qaida network represents the polar opposite of that.

What are the underlying views, if you really believe in a global community, on the one hand, or if you are a hard-core terrorist on the other hand who believes that we are the source of all evil, and that you can get even and even get ahead by killing a bunch of us, no matter who we are.

Those terrorists believe they have the truth. And if you share their truth, your life has value, but if you don't share their truths, you are just another target even if you are a 6-year-old girl who is going to the World Trade Center to go to work with her mother on Sept. 11. Or, if Muslim, you are a heretic if, God forbid, you don't think they are right.

I wish you could have heard some of the conversations I had with Muslims who had tears in their eyes and they were so angry about what happened. The al-Qaida, they think those Muslims are soft, corrupt, blind, that is their view. Those people think that in order to be in their community, you have to act alike and think alike. But we believe that you can be part of a lot of communities. You can be part of your family, your racial, your ethnic group, your religious group, your university group, your state, and yes, the global community that has those basic values premised on the fact that our fundamental, common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.

Now, most of you probably think that is easy to say. I mean, we are here in Las Vegas. It is comfortable, we are having a good time tonight, at least I hope you are. But what I want to tell you is that it is hard to do. It is easy to say, but hard to do. When (Sun editor) Brian Greenspun and I were seniors at Georgetown University, in a 60-day span in 1968 both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered trying to reconcile the American people to each other.

The greatest person who walked the Earth, I believe, in my lifetime was Gandhi. He was murdered, not by an angry Muslim, but by a fellow Hindu who thought he betrayed his faith and his nation because he thought India ought to be for everybody, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Jews and the Hindus.

Who has been murdered in the Middle East as a political leader? (Former Egyptian president Anwar) Sadat -- by the Israeli Defense Forces? No. By an angry Egyptian who thought Sadat betrayed his nation and his faith because he wanted a secular government for Egypt and peace with Israel.

I think the toughest day I had as President was the day (former Israeli prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. I loved him as much as I loved anybody outside of my family. And if he had lived, we would have had the peace that so many want. And when he was murdered, somehow without even knowing, the first time I heard he had been shot, I just instinctively knew that he was not murdered by a terrorist from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but by a young Israeli who thought he was a bad Jew and a bad Israeli because he wanted to give up a lifetime of fighting and to share the Holy Land so that Israel could finally have peace. There was an article just the other day interviewing that young man's family. They are still unrepentant. They think they did a very good thing.

Now, in the Middle East today, you see the incredible conflict of both these views. There is a majority of the Israelis, two-thirds, who are ready to trade land for peace yet two-thirds support the military action against the Palestinians. I spent a lot of time among the Palestinians. I can tell you that if we could get a comprehensive and accurate poll it would show that a majority of them would gladly make peace with Israel if they could have their state on the West Bank and Gaza. But a majority of them support the terrorist action against Israel.

Caught in this death lock is this conflict between whether you believe your differences and the claims that they make on others are more important than your common humanity. That is the whole deal folks. I know it doesn't sound complicated but it is the whole deal.

And the last thing I want to say to you about it is, you shouldn't be all that discouraged, no matter how bad the headlines are. The Earth is millions and millions of years old. One planet in one solar system in the universe that scientists tell us has millions of galaxies. Humans have been on this Earth, depending on how you read the archeological evidence, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 old. Nation states began to rise and compete with empires a few hundred years ago, and the system of nation states in Europe was only formalized about 350 years ago. Even in the 20th century with World War I, World War II and the slaughters of totalitarian monsters, we had the bloodiest time in all human history.

We have only recognized the possibility of worldwide cooperation since the end of World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And for less than 15 years now, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, have we been able to contemplate a truly global society where empire and conquest are no longer legitimate and everybody should have a place at the table.

In other words, we all live in a world that is still becoming, but it will not form as we would like it by accident. The contest between the forces of integration and disintegration is far from over. We have built a world without walls. If we want it to be fit for our children to live in, it will have to become a home for all the world's children.

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