For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
October 26, 2004
Vice President and Mrs. Cheney's Remarks in Wilmington, Ohio
Roberts Convention Center
Wilmington, Ohio
October 25, 2004
5:16 P.M. EDT
MRS. CHENEY: Well, thank you so much. What a great crowd, what a
great welcome. Please sit down. What a beautiful day. As we drove
over here, I couldn't help but think what a gorgeous part of the
country you live in, the blue sky, and -- (Applause.) It is
wonderful. And we frequently -- it just frequently occurs to me how
proud we all ought to be, to be Americans and live in this great
country. (Applause.)
Sometimes I think I'll make a list of all the things we have to be
proud of. And if I were to do that, right at the top of it, I'd put
our President, George W. Bush. (Applause.) He has been a wonderful
leader these past four years, and if you'll permit me to say so, the
Vice President is no slouch either. (Applause.)
Well, being here in Clinton County is a great thing. I understand
it is Bush-Cheney country. (Applause.) And we appreciate how hard you
are working to get out every vote. We really do appreciate that. It's
looking good. You look at -- it's going to be close, but we're a
little bit ahead. That's kind of where you want to be, not a little
bit ahead, a little bit ahead, right? But you see all these polls, and
I got the most heartening news this morning from my 10-year-old
granddaughter. Apparently, the Weekly Reader has conducted a poll
every presidential election since 1956. They have never been wrong.
And George W. Bush won by a landslide. (Applause.)
Well, I get to introduce Dick because I have known him for so
long. I have known him since he was 14 years old. This is true. And
that summer when I first knew him, he was sweeping out the Ben Franklin
store in Casper, Wyoming. That was his job. And I've known him
through many jobs since. I've known him since he was digging ditches
at the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo Grounds. And I've known him
since he was loading bentonite -- 100-pound sacks of bentonite onto
railroad cars. And I've known him since he was building power line all
across the West to pay his way through school. And I like to tell
those stories because I think when you grow up working hard, you learn
some really important lessons. And one of those lessons is that the
hard working people of this country ought to get to keep as much of
their paychecks as possible. (Applause.)
Well, I appreciated being introduced as a grandmother. I'm a
grandmother -- I'm a mother. I don't see too many grandmothers here
today, actually. Oh, okay, grandmother power is here. There are so
many important elections -- issues in this election, so many things
that I care about and I know you do, too, but when I think of it, I
think first of my kids and my grandkids. And I think about keeping
them safe, keeping them secure. And we all know -- in our realistic
moments, we all know that the terrorists will try to come after us
again. They'll try. And I ask myself when that happens, who do I want
to have standing in the doorway protecting us. And I'll tell you it is
not John Kerry. It is not John Edwards. It is George Bush. And,
ladies and gentlemen, it is my husband, Dick Cheney, the Vice President
of the United States. (Applause.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
Thank you. That was a pretty good introduction.
MRS. CHENEY: Like that? (Laughter.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: She's getting good at this, and we've got
eight days to go. But we're delighted to be back in Ohio again. I
want to thank Mike Turner. And I understand Rob Portman is here
someplace. There he is. Hey, Rob. They do a great job for the folks
here in Ohio. They're great friends of mine, and they are obviously
some of the leaders in the Congress today. You're going to hear a lot
from these two gentlemen in the years ahead, as well. And I'm
delighted to be with them here today, and to have them spend some time
with all of us.
This is obviously the closing stages of the campaign, and we're out
among them, you might say, traveling all across the country. We
started in Washington this morning. We've been in Fargo, North Dakota,
and Moorhead, Minnesota since then. And when we leave here, we'll be
in Florida. And we'll spend tomorrow in Florida. But we'll be back in
Ohio again before the week is out. So we're delighted to be here.
It's true Lynne has known me since I was 14, but she wouldn't go
out with me until I was 17. (Laughter.) I tell people that we --
actually, we got married because Dwight Eisenhower got elected
President of the United States. In those days, I was a youngster
living in Nebraska with my folks. Dad worked for the Soil Conservation
Service. Eisenhower got elected; reorganized the government; Dad got
transferred to Casper, Wyoming. And that's where I met Lynne, and we
grew up together, and went to high school together and recently
celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. (Applause.) Lynne says --
Lynne says 40 more years. (Laughter.) I wonder why the mike quit
right then. (Laughter.) But I explained to a group the other night
that if it hadn't been for Eisenhower's election victory, Lynne would
have married somebody else. And she said, right, and now he'd be Vice
President of the United States. (Laughter and applause.) But it's
true. I'm absolutely certain of it.
What we like do at these town hall meetings is have an opportunity
-- I've got some thoughts I'd like to share with you on one of the
major issues in the campaign this year. But then we'll open it up and
have an opportunity for you to ask questions, or make comments. I try
not to use up all the time with talk. But there are some very
important issues out there this year. This is -- I just figured out
the other day -- the 15th campaign I've been involved in, starting back
the first time when I worked for a gubernatorial candidate in 1966.
About half that time I've had my own name on the ballot, half the time
I was working for somebody else. But in all those years, I've never
seen an election that I think has the significance that this one does,
in terms of the choice we're going to make about who our President is
going to be for the next four years. And let me spend a little bit of
time on that this morning -- this afternoon, I guess. Who's keeping
track?
But I'm especially concerned and focused on this question of
national security and the war on terror and how we defend the nation
and guarantee the safety and security of our kids and grandkids and
those future generations. And I think this is one of those special
times in our history that comes along every once in a while, maybe
every 50 years, when something happens, a new threat emerges and we
have to organize ourselves and develop a new strategy, sometimes create
new organizations, new alliances in order to deal with that threat.
I think back to the period right after World War II, after we'd won
the tremendous victories in Europe and the Pacific, and then all of a
sudden in the late 1940s, we were faced with a new threat, the Soviet
Union, armed with nuclear weapons, all of a sudden occupied half of
Europe and was clearly an emerging threat to the United States.
That forced us to create new institutions. That's when we created
the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, and reconfigure our military forces. And
we put in place a strategy that was then sort of the foundation of
American security from then until 1989, 1990, really for about 40
years, supported by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
I think we're at again one of those sort of basic, fundamental
turning points in American history where we have a new threat, the
global terrorist threat, Islamic extremists, a perverted view of Islam,
that have launched terrorist attacks not only here in the United
States, but since 9/11 around the globe. A different kind of threat
than we've ever had to deal with before. It calls on us to develop a
new strategy for how we're going to deal with it and defeat. And
that's what I want to focus on a bit today because I think that feeds
directly into the question of who do you want to select then as the
Commander-in-Chief for the next four years, and obviously, to help lay
that groundwork, that foundation to guide us as we put in a place a
strategy that I think will have significance far beyond that.
9/11 was unique for several reasons. Obviously, it was the worst
attack ever on American soil. We lost more people that morning than we
lost at Pearl Harbor. And we learned that the terrorists could easily
gain access to our country, that with the price of a boarding pass and
box cutters and a little bit of training, they were able to take over
aircraft and do grievous damage in New York City, Washington, D.C.,
and, obviously in rural Pennsylvania, where United 93 went in.
We've also learned that the threat ultimately was bigger than that
because we've found since 9/11 in interrogating people that have been
captured, part of the al Qaeda organization, looking at their
activities, the training manuals and so forth, that they also are
trying very hard to get their hands on deadlier weapons. That their
objective here isn't just to be satisfied with the devastating damage
they wrought on 9/11, but rather to try to make the pain and problem
far more significant -- that is to say, they're trying to acquire
chemical or biological agent, or even a nuclear weapon. And the threat
we have to defeat is the possibility of a group of terrorists in the
middle of one of our own cities with a weapon of mass destruction. And
of course, that would threaten the lives of potentially hundreds of
thousands of Americans. And that's what we have to overcome. So when
you think about a threat of that scale, then you've obviously got to
put together a strategy. And ours has several parts -- things we've
done since 9/11. We've obviously spent a lot of time hardening our
defenses, that is improving our ability to defend the nation here at
home -- created the Department of Homeland Security, biggest
reorganization of the federal government since the Defense Department
was created back in the late '40s; the Patriot Act that gives new tools
to law enforcement to prosecute terrorists, the same tools that are now
available for drug traffickers, and for organized crime -- now, we're
able to apply them in the case of terrorism; Project BioShield, which
provides money and authority for the federal government to develop
defenses against attack with biological weapons. All those kinds of
steps -- toughening up the airline situation, improving our border
defenses, and surveillance, doing a better job with respect to
inspecting cargo coming into our ports. All of those are basically
defensive steps, a very important part of the overall strategy.
But given the nature of the threat, terrorists with WMD, we can't
afford to fail. We can be successful 999 times out of 1000, then the
one time they get through with that kind of capability, we'd be
devastated. So it's not enough to say we're going to have good
defense. So the President made a key decision, and that was that we're
also going to go on offense. That is to say that we'll use the full
might and power of the United States to go after terrorists wherever
they are, wherever they plan and organize to come at the United
States. And also -- and this is a significant new step -- that we will
use the power of the United States to go after and to hold to account
those individuals, organizations, states that sponsor terror -- state
sponsors of terror become a key target. That's new. We had not
operated that way previously.
Of course, the way we implemented the strategy, first, we went into
Afghanistan, we took down the Taliban. We captured and killed hundreds
of al Qaeda. We closed the training camps where an estimated 20,000
terrorists had trained in the late '90s, including some of those who
struck us on 9/11. After that then, the follow-on is to stand up a
democratically elected government in Afghanistan. Why do you do that?
Well, it doesn't do any good to go in and clean the place out and then
walk away and leave a failed state behind. It will simply revert back
to form and begin once again to become a breeding ground for terror.
So the Afghans -- we've worked closely with them. We set up an
interim government. They've registered 10 million people to vote, over
40 percent of those women. The held elections two weeks ago, the first
elections in the 5,000-year history of that country. (Applause.)
They've now finished counting the votes. Hamid Karzai is the winner.
There'll be a democratically elected government in place in Afghanistan
by the end of the year. And that's absolutely crucial.
The other thing that has to happen in Afghanistan is that they've
got to have security forces trained and equipped, and stood up capable
of taking on the responsibilities for securing their own country. And
we're actively and aggressively involved in that effort, as well, too.
Once we've done those two things, once they're capable and have a
government in place, and once they're capable of taking on and
defending themselves and providing for their own security, then the
United States is no longer required to be in Afghanistan. We're making
significant progress in a little over three years now, just about three
years since we launched there.
Iraq -- somewhat different proposition. There we had in Saddam
Hussein, a man who has started two wars, had for 12 years violated the
requirements of the U.N. Security Council, a man who had historically
produced and used weapons of mass destruction previously; had chemical
and biological agents that he's produced and used chemical weapons on
the Iranians and the Kurds; and had, as well, been a safe harbor, a
sanctuary, if you will, for terrorists, had provided a home for Abu
Nidal, for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was making $25,000 payments to
the families of suicide bombers, and also had a relationship with al
Qaeda.
Given that, we felt that that was the place where the potential
nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction was most
likely to occur -- given his history, his track record, his
capability. And obviously, we believe today the world is a whale of a
lot better off because Saddam Hussein is in jail instead of in his
palace. (Applause.)
And we're also proceeding with the other two steps in Iraq. We've
got an interim Iraqi government in place, took over in June. They've
held their first national assembly. They'll have elections in January
for a constitutional assembly that will write a constitution for Iraq.
And by the end of next year, they'll have nationwide elections to put a
new government in place, as well. We're also spending a lot of time
and effort now standing up and training Iraqi forces to provide for
their own security. There should be about 125,000 in place by the end
of the year, and we'll continue to add to that right on through next
year.
That's the strategy. That's the plan. That's where we're headed.
That's what needs to be done. The effort from the standpoint of what
has been accomplished to day I think is very impressive when you think
about it and back off. Remember, we've liberated 50 million people.
We've ended two of the bloodiest regimes in the world. We have also as
a result of what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan had a salutary
development elsewhere. People watched and saw what the President of
the United States did in those two countries. And Moammar Ghadafi in
Libya who had spent millions of dollars trying to acquire nuclear
weapons contacted Tony Blair and George Bush. And five days after we
captured Saddam Hussein, he went public and announced he was giving up
all of his nuclear materials, the uranium, the centrifuges, the weapons
designs. (Applause.) And one of the important things to remember here
is that when it was time to do that, he didn't call the United
Nations. He got hold of Tony Blair and George Bush. (Applause.) But
all of that material is now here under lock and key in the United
States. And he's out of the WMD business.
At the same time, that let us go after the network that had
supplied him with these materials. It was headed up by a man named
A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani who had developed Pakistan's program, but then
turned to the dark side, took the network that he had developed and
began to peddle that technology, nuclear weapons technology not only to
Libya, but he also sold to the Iranians and to North Korea. Very
positive developments. Would not have occurred if it hadn't been for
what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given all of that, I think we can look on that and feel very good
about what has been accomplished. But we shouldn't underestimate about
how difficult it is going forward. This is hard work. This is very
tough work. We know we're up against some tough adversaries in Iraq,
and a man named Zarqawi, you've heard about. He's an al Qaeda
affiliate, just recently pledged -- or re-pledged loyalty, if you will,
to Osama bin Laden. He was running a training camp in Afghanistan
prior to 9/11. When we went in there, he fled to Baghdad in Iraq. He
operated out of there ever since. He's responsible for a lot of the
bloodshed in Iraq now. And he's the man who periodically beheads
hostages on the evening news, a very, very evil individual.
Those are the kinds of people we're up against here. And their
objective is to disrupt this whole process. They don't want us to
succeed. They don't want to see Iraq set up a democratically elected
government. We get to January and succeed in doing that, they're going
to be out of business. But in the weeks and months ahead, we've got to
be prepared to deal with a difficult situation -- which our guys are
dealing with right now, even as we speak. And they will continue to do
that as we get more and more Iraqis into the effort over there, too.
I think it has been a remarkable success story to date, when you
look at what has been accomplished overall. I think the President
deserves great credit for it. The other credit -- most of the credit,
a good part of the credit, needs to go specifically, as well, to the
men and women of the United States Armed Forces. They've done a superb
job. (Applause.)
Now, the question on November 2nd is do we want to continue with
the President in the role that he has fulfilled I think very ably for
the last three-and-a-half, that we're committed to that strategy. It's
a tough, aggressive, go-after-the-bad-guys strategy, go after those who
support terror. I think it's absolutely essential. I think it's there
best way to defend America -- is to go after them wherever they are, so
they can't get further attacks off against the United States. We're
far better off taking them over there on their turf, than we are having
to fight them in the streets of our own cities. (Applause.)
Now, John Kerry, obviously, would like to have that job. He has
every right to run for it. The question is whether or not the American
people believe he's qualified based on his record.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: You're getting ahead of me here. (Laughter.)
Whether or not he's the man to take over that responsibility, and I'm
not challenging his patriotism, never have. I am questioning his
judgment. I think it's perfectly appropriate for us to look at his
record in public service over the last 20 years, and even before that
when he first started to run for office back in the '70s, and say, what
does that record say about whether or not he would pursue an aggressive
strategy, the kind of strategy that I believe has been demonstrated to
be effective and that we need to pursue in the years ahead if we're
going to win the war on terror and defeat our adversaries.
And when you look at his background, frankly, it's not encouraging
-- or reassuring, shall we say? When he first ran for Congress in the
early '70s, he ran on the basis that you should never commit U.S.
forces without U.N. authorization. I don't think that's a very good
idea. I don't think any President wants to cede or delegate to anyone
else, or any other organization that authority. The President of the
United States is the Commander-in-Chief under Article II of our
Constitution, and that's as it should be. (Applause.)
In 1984, when he ran for the Senate the first time, he ran on a
platform of cutting or eliminating a great many of the weapons systems
that President Reagan used to keep the peace, to win the Cold War, and
that we're using today in the war on terror. In 1991, when Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait and stood poised to dominate the Persian Gulf,
and when all of the tests that anybody could conceivably want with
respect other authorizing the U.S. to operate -- in that case, the U.N.
Security Council had voted unanimously for the use of force. So we met
his 1970s test, if you will, in that regard. The effort that was
mounted then, enormously successful, 34 nations alongside us, John
Kerry voted "no." He was against Operation Desert Storm. It's hard to
think of a set of conditions under which he would be comfortable using
U.S. military force.
1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked, he was a
member of the Senate intelligence committee -- he missed all of the
public meetings of the intelligence committee for the subsequent year
after the attack, and offered up an amendment to cut billions dollars
out of our intelligence budget. That's his record. It's there for
anybody who wants to look at it, to see that this is not a man who has
made the right judgments during his time in the Senate. 20 years in
the United States Senate, and he nearly always came down on the wrong
side of national security issues.
If we come on forward, obviously, to the present time, we've seen
the back-and-forth during the course of the campaign over what his
views are. He, of course, decided after he voted to commit troops to
Iraq, a year later when he was taking some heat in the Democratic
primaries from Howard Dean, who was running as the antiwar candidate,
then he voted against providing the troops with the funding and the
resources they needed, to provide them with the equipment and the
ammunition and the spare parts and so forth that were vital to their
operations in Iraq -- voted to commit the troops, and then once they
were in combat, he voted against them -- and did it basically for
political reasons.
Now, if he couldn't stand up to the pressures of Howard Dean, how
can you expect him to stand up to Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda
organization? (Applause.)
Finally, and most recently, a couple of weeks ago, he gave an
interview to The New York Times. It ran in the Sunday newspaper two
weeks ago. And in that interview, he was asked sort of what his
aspirations or objective would be in connection with the war on
terror. And he said, well, he wanted to get terror back to the place
where it was just a nuisance, and then he compared it to illegal
gambling and prostitution. That was his choice of words.
And I thought about that when I read that, and I said, well, when
was terrorism ever just a nuisance? Was it four years ago when they
attacked the USS Cole killed 17 of our sailors and nearly sunk the ship
off Yemen? Or maybe six years ago when they simultaneously attacked
two of our embassies in East Africa and killed hundreds of people
including a number of Americans? Or maybe it was back in 1993, 11
years ago, in the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York
when they tried to bring down one of the towers then but failed? Or
1988, December, when they blew Pan Am 103 out of the skies over
Lockerbie, Scotland? Or maybe 21 years ago, Beirut, 1983, when a
suicide bomber in a truck loaded with explosives drove into the ground
floor of a building hosting Marines and killed 241 of our Marines? Was
that a nuisance?
I don't think so. I don't think you can find a time when terrorism
was ever a nuisance. I don't think our objective can be to manage
terror to some appropriate acceptable level. I think our objective has
to be to defeat terror, and that's what we'll with George Bush as
President. (Applause.)
I was intrigued by -- some material here, I got some notes here
that I wanted to bring with me today, some things John Kerry has been
working on the last few days. Sometimes he's in the business of
obscuring his record. And sometimes he's in the business of burnishing
his record, if I can put it in those terms.
He being pressed on the question of terror, and how aggressive he
would be in the war on terror. And he said, well, he was an expert
because he had written a book about it 10 years ago. And the book was
called The New War. Anybody here read John Kerry's book The New War?
I guess, it wasn't a best-seller. (Laughter.) In it he praises Yasser
Arafat as a statesman and a role model. Yasser Arafat. Now, don't
quite look on Arafat that way. It makes it clear in the book that he
thinks the answer to terrorism is law enforcement. Now, no question
law enforcement is a part of it. That was our answer, though, before
9/11. When terrorists killed Americans by thousands, it's law
enforcement we need, it's a military response we need. (Applause.)
The other thing he's done a couple of times recently. He did this
in, I guess, it was the second debate, where he talked about -- again
trying to demonstrate how experienced he was in the international
arena, and how he would be able to work with allies and foreign
governments and so forth. He talked about going to the U.N. Security
Council back at the time when we had the debate over whether or not we
were going to authorize the President to use force in Iraq. He said he
went up -- he's done this a couple of times, he went and he talked to
all of them, he said, the members of the United Nations Security
Council and made the same claim saying that he spent a couple of hours
talking with the entire Security Council, those are his words, about
how to deal with Saddam Hussein.
Well, this week a reporter from The Washington Times decided to
check on that meeting. And he got hold of five of the ambassadors on
the U.N. Security Council, and four of them said, they'd never met
Senator Kerry. (Laughter.) So he apparently -- when they went to the
U.S. Mission to the United Nations, an official is quoted in the report
as saying, we were as surprised as anyone when Senator Kerry starting
talking about meeting with the Security Council.
Now, the problem with all of that is -- I look at all of that and
what I see is somebody who is trying very hard to take a record that
for 20 years was on the wrong side of national security issues, and
suddenly now because we're faced with the war on terror, because of the
aftermath of 9/11, because of the need to be tough and aggressive in
the strategy we employ to defend the nation, now he's trying to put a
new gloss on his record. He doesn't want anybody to talk about what he
did for 20 years in the United States Senate. That says to me that
this is not a man who is committed to the course of action that he
claims to be committed to. You cannot substitute a few minutes of
tough talk during the course of a 90-minute debate at election time to
cover up 20 years of what I think has been weakness on national
security issues in the United States Senate. It won't work.
(Applause.)
Or as we say out in our home state of Wyoming, you can put all the
lipstick you want on a pig, but it's still a pig. (Laughter.)
So given that, we've got a big choice on November 2nd. The
President, I think, has got a demonstrated record there now for
three-and-a-half, nearly four years, and doing exactly the right
thing. He doesn't worry about the polls or shift his position with the
political winds. This is a man who makes a decision and sticks to it,
and a man that we can count on, a man our troops can count on, and a
man that has got a strategy for a victory in the war on terror, and
that's exactly what we need is George Bush for four more years.
(Applause.)
Well, with that, I've covered a lot of territory and used up a fair
amount of time, but what we'd like to do now is have an opportunity for
you to ask questions. You'll see folks in the audience in these
attractive orange jerseys. And they've got microphones with them. If
you've got a comment or a question, just see if you can flag one of
them down, and they'll come over with a mike, and then we'll be happy
to try to respond. And don't be bashful. You can ask Lynne questions,
as well, too. She knows some of the issues better than I do.
Number one.
Q Mr. Vice President, Lynne, I can't imagine the time you've
spent this past few months. We thank you for what you've done.
(Applause.)
And with that, we keep hearing about somebody keeps having a plan,
I'd like to know what your plan is for you and your family come
November 3rd after a successful election? (Laughter and applause.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, what we're going to do is unpack and get
some laundry done. (Laughter.) No, it's been -- the campaign has
really been a remarkable experience. You can sit in Washington and be
involved in the policy debates and so forth, and that's all important
work. And that's why we run for office, just so we can participate in
that process. But we've had the privilege -- Lynne and I have now over
the last year, we've been in 48 states. We have campaigned from one
end of this country to the other. And you meet some unbelievably
remarkable people. The nation is full of them, and they're from every
walk of life, from every part of the country, from every ethnic
background, the enormous diversity and strength and resilience and just
fundamental, downright decency of the American people cannot be
underestimated. When you get out and do so many events -- (applause)
-- it's what makes it all worthwhile. In the political business you
need a fairly thick skin. And you build up scar tissue over time, I
suppose. But what keeps you going is there are so many Americans out
there when you get out and get a chance to spend some time with them,
they say, thank you, we're praying for you, God bless you, we're doing
the right thing, and that's what keeps you going.
You get to spend time with the United States military. I've
visited with Marines at Pendleton, and with the 3rd Ranger Battalion
down at Fort Benning, and with the 82nd at Fort Bragg, and had the
opportunity over the years in a number of capacities to spend time with
the young men and women in the U.S. military. They're just a fantastic
group of people. And so when you get through with the day-to-day
hustle and bustle and the campaign. And as I say, we're looking
forward to a victory on November 2nd, then we'll go to work for the
next four years, what makes it all worthwhile is that we're part of a
process that's one of the unique and distinguishing features of our
civilization, is the American people governing themselves. And we're
all privileged to be a part of it. (Applause.)
Somebody back here, number three.
Q (Inaudible.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. (Laughter and applause.) The U.N. is an
interesting organization because occasionally it provides a useful
forum
for debates. I think they've done some good humanitarian work over
the years various places. So I don't -- I'm not here today to trash
the United Nations. But they've also got some problems. And one of
the biggest problems we've encountered in connection with the whole
Iraq operation, of course, is the U.N. oil-for-food program, and the
extent to which Saddam Hussein had been able to use the oil-for-food
program to corrupt the whole process, to try to buy support from
governments who play a prominent role at the United Nations, and
undermine the sanctions that were in place, put in place after the Gulf
War, and he was successful at it.
If you look at the report -- the Duelfer report that came out just
recently, the sanctions were breaking down; the oil-for-food program
had really been taken over and was being run by him; and he'd managed
to inject a high degree of corruption into that whole process. So
instead of the United Nations being this effective force for
implementing the U.N. Security Council resolutions, demanding that he
disarm, demanding that he come clean on all of his programs, and that
he comply with the terms and conditions that he agreed to at the end of
the Gulf War, they, in effect, had become implementers -- I'm trying to
think what the phrase is.
MRS. CHENEY: Enablers.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Enablers who, in fact, were enabling him to
increasingly break down the sanctions and import just about anything
you wanted to import. And instead of the funds that they were
generating off the oil-for-food program going to feed and provide
medical assistance for the Iraqi people, it was being used for these
other purposes. So clearly, that's a major problem that needs to be
addressed. It is Paul Volcker is running an investigation there now,
and I'm convinced he'll do a good job.
The bottom line is the United States needs to, I think, work with
the United Nations when it makes sense to do so. But fundamental
responsibility of the President of the United States is to defend
America, to protect and preserve the Constitution of the United
States. And you cannot delegate that to anybody else. (Applause.)
Sometimes there'll be a conflict. And if there's a choice to be
made, there's only one way for him to come down and that is on the side
of his constitutional duties and responsibilities.
Yes, number four are you loafing? Or have you got somebody over
there? (Laughter.)
Q (Inaudible.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay, well, first of all, thank you for your
service. (Applause.) The process that's now underway they're getting
ready to organize to hold elections. The target date for the elections
is January. At the same time, there is a major effort underway to deal
with the insurgency that is still there. That tends to be focused in
the Sunni -- what we refer to as the Sunni Triangle, Baghdad and west
of Baghdad, and that general area. The Kurdish area in the north and
the Shia area in the south are relatively safe and secure. And as I
say, there's a major effort underway to train and equip Iraqi security
forces. That is being run by a man named General Petraeus, General
David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st during the initial operation
when we first went into Iraq, a very able and talented officer. And
he's in charge of that operation, and that's going quite well.
The various plans for how to put together the government -- and
they're actively now negotiating various members of the Iraqi interim
authority, as well as others, trying to figure out what kind of tickets
to put together to run in the elections, how this process is going to
unfold going forward, as well as, as I say, ultimately write a
constitution. They've adopted already what is called a transitional
administrative law. It was approved last spring. And it lays out sort
of the basic procedures and ground rules for how they're going to
function -- they want to sit down and write their own constitution,
which they will do, as I say, once they've elected -- somewhat
analogous, I suppose to our own Constitutional Convention that we held
back in Philadelphia in 1780. And that's what is going to happen next
year in Iraq as they write a constitution to get ready for nationwide
elections.
(Technical difficulties.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's difficult. It's hard. But we've talked
with a number of Iraqis. They are uniformly thankful for what we've
done and enthusiastic about the process, being able to establish a
democratically elected, representative government for themselves in
Iraq. They've never had that. And we cannot and should not
underestimate the enormous power of that idea.
I always recall Central America in the middle '80s, when I was in
Congress. We had an insurgency in El Salvador. A lot of -- a third of
the country was controlled by insurgents. And there were some 75,000
people killed in that conflict. And finally they got around to the
point where they were able to schedule elections, and I went down. I
was an observer. A group of members of Congress went down as observers
for the election. And I was always struck by the enormous drive these
people had to get to the polls on election day. And they'd line up by
the thousands waiting to vote. Sometimes the guerrillas would come in
and shoot up the polling place. Everybody would flee and duck for
cover. But as soon as the guerrillas left, boy, they were right back
in line again to vote. And 20 some years later, El Salvador is a
viable, functioning -- democracy. It works. But that antidote to
terror is freedom. And that's what we're going to do in Iraq.
(Applause.)
MRS. CHENEY: I just wanted to add a couple things. One is that
the interim constitution in Iraq guarantees women's rights, and women's
-- a place in the parliament. That's a very good -- (Applause.)
And Dick -- one other thing. I have another point to make.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, all right. (Laughter.)
MRS. CHENEY: The Afghan women who voted were incredibly brave.
They went to the polls -- some of them had been pulled off buses and
killed, women who registered to vote. I just -- someone just gave me a
report that some of the Afghan women were so convinced they'd be killed
when they voted, that they underwent the rituals that you undergo if
you're about to die. But they voted anyway. That's the power of
freedom. (Applause.)
MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MODERATOR: I think we have time for one more question.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: All right, well, we've got one right over
here. Number two.
Q Mr. Vice President, Mrs. Cheney, living in Ohio, I'm sure
it's no surprise to you that we get a lot of sound bites,
advertisements, phone messages, on and on and on. Some of them,
frankly, puts words into your and the President's mouths -- that's
probably not a surprise. And one that fizzled out, you may remember,
was re-instituting the draft. No one surprised when the only
proponent was a Democratic congressman from New York.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right, Charlie Rangel.
Q Now, we're hearing that the President and yourself are going
to completely privatize Social Security, take away all the benefits.
And I have a couple elderly aunts who requested that I ask you what the
administration's position is on this?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Tell them to relax. (Laughter.) They're not
going to be drafted. (Laughter and applause.)
No, the Social Security program is in good shape for the current
generation of recipients, and probably for the next generation of
recipients, too. But we got a problem down the road, and for that
younger generation, people now in their 20s and 30s, there's going to
be a crunch point where Social Security will have made commitments that
they don't have funding to fulfill. And everybody knows that at some
point we've got to address that issue now. And one of the things that
we've talked about, the President has talked about would be a voluntary
program, would not apply to anybody who is already retired drawing
benefits, probably anybody who will retire in the not-to-distant
future. But we go to somebody like my kids, for example, and say to
them, you can have an option. You can take a portion of your payroll
tax and put it into a personal savings account, as opposed to putting
the whole into the Social Security trust fund.
That would give them -- first of all, it gives them control over
it. Secondly, it gives them a higher rate of return. It would have to
be invested in some approved plans. It would be more like a 401k but
it would be theirs. We think that it offers significant potential
because once you get a higher rate of return there, you begin to close
that revenue gap long-term. It doesn't close complete, but it moves in
the right direction. And it also gives people more control over an
important part of their lives, their own personal retirement account.
That's the idea that's being talked about. We think it has merit.
There's obviously a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of
questions would have to be answered in connection with that. And you'd
also obviously have to put together a bipartisan group to get it
approved. But we think it's important to begin to address those kinds
of issues.
But this notion that somehow if you elect Republican, you're going
to do in Social Security, I've heard that in, well, nearly all of the
15 campaigns I've been involved in. When you get down to the tail end
of the campaign, and our opponent is in trouble, they always trot out,
oh, watch out Social Security -- the Republicans are going to do it
in. Not true. Won't happen. Every public official I know of is
committed to making certain that Social Security is there for our
senior citizens. They've paid into it through their working career,
their entire lifetimes. They earned those benefits. And it's
important that that commitment be kept, and it will be kept.
(Applause.)
Let's do one more back here. You can sit down there.
Q Is there any time that you know that you guys are going to
come out of Iraq and bring our children home? I have four over there
-- had them there, got a son going back, and I had one killed. I'd
like a little relief.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we appreciate very much, obviously, the
sacrifice that has been made. They've done a superb job for us, as I
mentioned. I think of it in terms of when we have the capability in
place so that we've completed the mission. If you put an artificial
date on it, then you end up with the terrorists just waiting until that
date arrives, and the Americans withdraw and then they'll reassert
themselves. So that's not acceptable. And they've got to know what
we'll stay the course and that they're not going to be able to win no
matter what they attempt and try.
We've found the Iraqis are eager to get into the fight. We're not
having any trouble, in spite of the fact that many of them have been
targeted by the terrorists, those who are associated or being recruited
into the various security services, that that hasn't slowed them down
for a minute. They're eager to sign up. And as I say, we should by
the end of this year have 125,000 on board and that continues to build
right through next year. We don't want to stay a day longer than
necessary, but we do want to stay long enough to make certain that it
doesn't revert back to the situation we had before. And the best way I
can think of to honor the sacrifice of those who've sacrificed so much
is to complete the mission. And that's what we've got to do.
(Applause.)
Now, I want to thank all of you for being here today. We're
delighted, as I say, to have a chance to spend some time in a beautiful
part of Ohio. And with your help in November 2nd, we're going to win
this one.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END 6:05 P.M. EDT
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