Keynote Address of the 60th Anniversary Dinner of the School of Advanced International Studies The Johns Hopkins University

Keynote Address of the 60th Anniversary Dinner of the School of Advanced
International Studies The Johns Hopkins University


Secretary Colin L. Powell, Recipient of The Johns Hopkins University
President's Medal
Embassy of Italy
Washington, DC
October 13, 2004

(7:00 p.m. EDT)

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, President Brody. It's
such a great pleasure for me to be here this evening. I can't tell you how
honored I am to receive this prestigious award, and to be counted among many
distinguished recipients who have received it in the past. I want to thank you,
Dean Einhorn -- Jessica, my friend -- for asking me to be here this evening,
and I would like to thank all of you for coming out to pay tribute to this
remarkable institution. And, Bill, I thank you especially for taking note of
the Colin Powell Center at my alma mater, City College of New York. It, too, is
dedicated to public service. It, too, is dedicated to investing in the young
people of America.

As you noted, my parents were immigrants, I was an immigrant kid, and it was
the public school system of New York City that invested in all of these
immigrant kids from kindergarten all the way through college, without us paying
a cent for it, because they felt that it was the responsibility of a community,
of a city, to invest in its future by educating its children. And the least I
could do is to help City College create a center that will be dedicated to that
proposition, to helping young immigrant kids who continue to come to this
nation in such numbers to find their dreams, to realize their hopes and
desires.

One of the things I did at my center, and I'm very proud of, is I got a
scholarship in the name of my parents, a scholarship that rewards excellence in
academics but also requires that the student be committed to community service,
to giving back to others. And I think tonight is a special occasion then to me
to have you make a connection between SAIS and my center in New York, and I
thank you for doing that.

And it's such a pleasure to have this event in such elegant surroundings, in
the beautiful Italian Embassy. Ambassador and Mrs. Vento, thank you for
providing this splendid setting for those of us who are gathered here, and also
for inviting in those who are not here in the room but are watching this by
closed circuit television.

And, Mr. Ambassador, I would be remiss if I did not respond to your comments
about the strength of the Italian-American relationship, and I take this
opportunity, sir, to thank you and thank my dear friend, Prime Minister
Berlusconi, and Franco Frattini, my foreign minister colleague, and the Italian
people for the steadfast support you have given to America in times of peace
and war, and especially in the last four years as we have fought this war
against terrorism. Mr. Ambassador, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
(Applause.)

I'm not a SAIS alum, but I've been a SAIS booster for a long time. I was the
1992 commencement speaker when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And
I'm proud to have a fellowship named after me here at SAIS, thanks to the
thoughtfulness of former Dean George Packard. And this year's fellow, Qahira
El'Amin, is here. Qahira, where are you? Just raise your hand so you can be
recognized. Somewhere. There you are. Congratulations. (Applause.) I'm also
grateful that your former Dean, Paul Wolfowitz, my friend and colleague of many
years, with whom I've shared many adventures, I want to thank him for his
efforts between those of Dean Packard and Dean Einhorn to keep me in touch with
SAIS and keep SAIS growing and thriving at the highest possible level of
achievement.

Now, as Secretary of State, I've become an even bigger SAIS booster than
before. That's because SAIS is a university of diplomacy, and for nearly four
years now I've been immersed in the universe of diplomacy. So I've come to
particularly admire an institution that brings the best of scholarship to bear
on practical issues of policy. I appreciate an institution that has always been
dedicated not to teaching students how to figure out what we should have done
in the past, but what we need to do now, what we need to do now to get ready
for the future.

SAIS's mark of diplomatic distinction was inscribed from the start by its
founders, two masters of hands-on diplomacy: Christian Herter and Paul Nitze.
Christian Herter, of course, was one of my predecessors as Secretary of State.
Paul, who can't be with us this evening but I hope will be able to see a tape
of this evening's event, was the second director of the State Department's
Office of Policy Planning. He is an icon to those of us who are in the State
Department. I could spend the whole evening talking about Paul and going
through this resume, but it's all so well known to all of you. But I have to
say that Paul Nitze was a close colleague of mine, especially getting to know
him during the final two years of the Reagan Administration, when I was
National Security Advisor and Paul was senior advisor to the President and the
Secretary of State on arms control. It was shocking to me then, a three-star
general, to sit at a head of a table with all kinds of distinguished
individuals and to have Paul Nitze at the table. It was like having Moses at
the table. (Laughter.) This man who had 50 years under his belt when I was just
trying to figure out how to be National Security Advisor.

But as we all know, Paul is someone who mentors others, who is a friend to all.
I was so proud to work with Paul during those final years of the Soviet Union,
as we concluded arms control agreements. The one that I'm especially proud of
was the INF Treaty of 1987 that Paul, George Shultz and so many of us worked on
so very hard. The first arms control agreement that actually eliminated nuclear
weapons, eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons on both sides, SS-20s
and others on the Russian side and the Pershing-II and ground-launched cruise
missiles on our side -- a remarkable achievement, and Paul had so much to do
with it.

I'll never forget, a couple of years later, when the missiles were actually
being destroyed and it was clear that the Cold War was coming to a rapid end,
that we had an event over at the Smithsonian, to which I invited my Russian
colleague. I was now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General
Mikhail Moiseyev came to the Smithsonian as we showed to the world these two
missiles, the Russian SS-20 with three warheads sitting there, and then the
Pershing-II right next to it, a single-warhead missile. And my wife, Alma, who
is with me this evening and was with me that evening, looked up at the two of
them and she looked at me and she said, "How come theirs was bigger?"
(Laughter.) The Cold War died a slow death in the Powell household. (Laughter.)

But of all the things that he accomplished, of all that Paul Nitze did in his
long and distinguished career, I think he would say, if he was with us this
evening, that the founding of SAIS has to be at the top of the list -- and he's
right to so say. He and Christian Herter set in motion something amazing and
something sublime back in 1943. And over the past 60 years the SAIS faculty has
included some of the greatest teachers of diplomacy ever to grace a classroom.
And of course, great faculty produces great graduates -- SAIS's pre-eminent
purpose. Of those great graduates there are far too many around the world, far
too many here tonight, for me to start naming anyone, but it's clear that this
tradition of excellence carries unto this day and will carry into the future
that tradition so befitting of Paul and Christian, here in Washington, in
Bologna, and in Nanjing.

SAIS's remarkable achievements owe much to the concept of the school at its
origin, and that concept bears on our own circumstances today. Christian and
Paul saw a new world in the making. They saw new opportunities as well as new
challenges ahead. And they knew that we had to have a fundamentally sound
understanding of that new world if we hoped to deal effectively with that new
world. So the focus of education should be on the long haul, and that is
exactly the right focus.

We, too, in the Bush Administration see a new world taking shape before our
eyes, a world also with its opportunities and dangers. And just as the founders
of SAIS knew that understanding change at the most fundamental level was the
key to managing that change, so do we in the Bush Administration.

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 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 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
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 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.)
2004/1106
[End]


Released on October 14, 2004

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