For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
July 19, 2004
Vice President Participates in a Q&A; at the Boone County Lumber Company in Columbia, Missouri
The Boone County Millwork Showroom & Production Facility
Columbia, Missouri
1:04 P.M. CDT
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you all very
much. Sit down, please.
And, Brad, I want to thank you for that introduction. And let me
thank the Eisserts for hosting us here today. They've got a great
story to tell about the business. And Howard, who founded the company,
I guess, in 1965. And the story I was told was your former employer,
International Paper, suggested maybe you wouldn't be successful.
(Laughter.) And the facility that's just down the way here as part of
this complex is one he bought from International Paper some years
later. So -- (Laughter and applause.)
I've got my wife, Lynne, with me today. Lynne, you want to stand
up and take a bow? (Applause.) One of the reasons she's with me is
because on this trip, on Saturday night, we visited our hometown of
Casper, Wyoming, where we attended our 45th high school reunion. She
looks just as good today as she did then. (Laughter and applause.)
I often joke that the reason we got married was because Dwight
Eisenhower got elected President in 1952. Because in 1952, I was
living in Lincoln, Nebraska with my folks. Dad worked for the Soil
Conservation Service. And Eisenhower came in, reorganized the
Department of Agriculture. Dad got transferred to Casper, Wyoming.
And that's how I met Lynne. We grew up together, went to high school
together, and we'll mark our 40th wedding anniversary next month. And
I explained to a group that if it hadn't been for that Eisenhower
victory in 1952, Lynne would have married somebody else. (Laughter.)
She said, right, and now he'd be Vice President of the United States.
(Laughter and applause.)
But we're here today because we wanted to have an opportunity to
talk about some of the major issues in ths year's election. I think
this is going to be one of the most important elections of my
lifetime. I say that not just because my name is going to be on the
ballot, right alongside the President's, but because I really think the
issues we've got to deal with this year, the very significant issues
with respect to national security and foreign policy, as well as our
economy are going to shape the course of history, really, for the next
30, 40, 50 years, that this is one of those elections with big issues
at stake. And it's very important that we get it right. And I wanted
to spend a few minutes today talking about those concerns, and then
I'll open it up to questions and have the opportunity to respond to
whatever your comments and concerns might be, as well, too.
Being here at Boone County Millwork is a great place to illustrate
exactly the kind of thing we're talking about. When the President and
I got elected, we were headed into a recession. The 401k plans and
retirement plans of a lot of folks were going downhill because the
stock market was in a slide. Then we had the terrorist attacks of
9/11, and that shook the economy once again. The bottom line result
was we needed some fairly fast and aggressive action to get the economy
back on track. And I think that's exactly what the President
delivered. He delivered significant tax relief for the America people
-- not once, not twice, but three times. (Applause.)
More than 2 million taxpayers here in Missouri are paying lower
federal taxes today because of the cuts that we passed over the last
three years. Things like doubling the child tax credit; reducing the
marriage penalty; cutting rates across the board -- all those things
are very important. When we look at a business like this one, in the
final analysis what's most important I think to everybody is to have a
good job at a decent wage. That's key to having a healthy economy, and
that means businesses -- especially small businesses that create 70
percent of the new jobs in this country -- it's absolutely essential
they be allowed to succeed. And it's important they be allowed to
invest in new plant and equipment. Some of the changes that the
President put in place, such as making it possible -- we, in effect,
quadrupled the amount of new equipment that could be expensed by a
small business -- up to a $100,000 a year; provided for accelerated
appreciation so companies were able to go out and make investments that
created opportunities that made it possible for them to hire more
people to work in those businesses. That's happened all across the
board.
But one of the key things we did that I think is important
long-term is to deal with the death tax. Now, the death tax that's
been out there for a long time affects not just the wealthy, it affects
ranchers and farmers who have got businesses, in effect, small
businesses like this -- want to be able to pass on to the next
generation what they've built over a lifetime of work. And the fact of
the matter is, the way the old estate laws work, we, in effect, tax
those properties twice. People earn the money and build those
businesses -- they pay tax on it. And then when you die, Uncle Sam
comes back and taxes it once again. It makes it almost impossible to
pass on that business to the next generation. You have to sell it off
to pay the taxes. Well, we put an end to that by doing away with the
death tax, phasing it out over time -- basic fundamental fairness --
(Applause.)
But we do have the economy back on the right track. Our economic
growth over the last year nationwide is nearly 5 percent. We've added
over 1.5 million new jobs since last August. Inflation is down.
Productivity is up. Real disposable income is up. We've got
everything headed in the right direction. Basic bottom line
conclusion, the President's policy works. Those tax cuts are working.
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. (Applause.)
On the national security front, we have been through a truly
remarkable time in American history. Think back to what has transpired
in the three-and-a-half years that George Bush has been President.
It's a set of developments and events that nobody could have
anticipated. When he and I were sworn in, we expected to have to deal
with the economy. We had a plan for that to deal with education. We
had a plan for that. The President wanted to aggressively move to
create standards in accountability in our public schools. And we've
done that.
But what nobody could expect what was happened to us on 9/11. We
ended up in a situation, obviously, on that day when we were struck by
terrorists who had been planning the attack since 1996, and that
morning they killed some 3,000 of our fellow citizens without
provocation. Some people suggest that the use of strength is what
provokes terrorists. I don't think so. It's the perception of
weakness that provokes terrorists. (Applause.)
Now, the terrorists had learned some unfortunate lessons in the
period before George Bush became President. We had been struck
repeatedly over the years -- 1993, the first attack on the World Trade
Center; 1996, Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia; 1998, they struck
simultaneously two of our embassies in East Africa and killed hundreds
of people; in 2000, they attacked the USS Cole, killed 17 of our
sailors and came close to sinking in a major warship; and then, of
course, 2001, we were struck -- the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, once again. If you look back on that period of time, they'd
learned two unfortunate lessons. One was they could strike us with
relative impunity, because they had repeatedly. We'd been able to go
after and arrest individuals who were involved in those attacks, but we
never sort of reached beyond that to take down the organization, or to
attack the organization that was responsible for planning and carrying
out those attacks. And secondly, they'd learned if they hit us hard
enough, we'd change our policies. Because we did in 1983, when we were
hit in Beirut, we lost 241 Marines there on a Sunday morning, and we
withdrew from Lebanon. In 1993, they hit us in Mogadishu, Somalia,
within two weeks, we were out of Somalia.
That was the set of going-in assumptions if you will when we were
struck on the morning of 9/11, a little over -- almost three years ago
now. The President responded I think in ways that the terrorists never
anticipated. He got very aggressive. That included not only did we
have to harden our defenses here at home and make it tougher for the
terrorists to strike us here, but also he made a couple of other basic
decisions.
One of those was that we would go after any state that sponsored
terror, or that provided support for terror -- (applause) -- and that
we would use military force, if need be, to defend the United States by
going after the terrorists wherever they might plot and plan their
attacks against us. (Applause.)
Now, the result of all of that, of course, was we launched into
Afghanistan, took down the Taliban, closed the training camps that had
trained some 20,000 terrorists in the last part of the '90s; killed and
captured hundreds of al Qaeda; and put bin Laden on the run.
Since then, we've stood up a new government in Afghanistan. Hamid
Karzai runs it. They've got a Constitution. They'll hold free
elections in October of this year for the first time ever and be on the
path toward establishing a democracy in Afghanistan -- very, very
important piece of work. (Applause.)
In Iraq, of course, we went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein was
probably one of the worst dictators of the 20th century. He had
previously started two wars. He had produced and used weapons of mass
destruction. You can go today, stand on a hill up at a place called
Halabja, in northern Iraq and look out on a field where thousands of
Kurds are buried who were gassed with weapons of mass destruction by
Saddam Hussein in 1988. He had a long history of hosting terrorists.
The Abu Nidal organization killed hundreds of people at one point: It
operated out of Baghdad -- Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was paying
$25,000 to the families of suicide bombers. And he had a relationship
with al Qaeda. One of the worst offenders in the modern world, and he
represented more than anything else -- from our perspective -- that
possibility that terrorists operating out of Iraq would be able to get
their hands on some of those deadly substances, or the technology that
Saddam Hussein had developed in the past.
So we went into Iraq, took down the regime. Saddam Hussein is in
jail. His sons are dead, and the government is gone. (Applause.)
Today, of course, the situation in Iraq is that we've got a new
interim government that's been stood up since the end of June. We've
transferred sovereign authority to that government. We're working very
aggressively to train Iraqi security forces so they can take over the
responsibility from our guys for providing for the security for the
Iraqi people. They've got a plan to write to a constitution. They'll
hold their first free elections next January. And they're well on
their way to getting established in Iraq the kind of government that
will never again be a safe haven for terror; never again threaten their
neighbors; never again pursue weapons of mass destruction; never again
be a threat to the United States. (Applause.)
Finally, of course, Moammar Ghadafi, in Libya, watched all of
this. He'd been spending millions and millions of dollars over the
years to develop nuclear weapons. He had everything he needed to
achieve that purpose. He had the technology. He had the uranium. He
had the enrichment capability to enrich the uranium to weapons-grade
level. He had a weapons design. And he was actively and aggressively
trying to acquire nuclear weapons. He watched what we did in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and he decided maybe he might want to reconsider
what he was all about. Five days after we arrested Saddam Hussein,
Colonel Ghadafi went public and said, I give it up, come get it, it's
all yours. (Applause.) All of that material and equipment now resides
down at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. The President was down there a week
ago today to personally inspect it himself.
And, of course, the final piece of business was the A.Q. Khan
network. This is the man who created the Pakistani nuclear bomb, then
he diverted the suppliers' network to his own purposes and has been
selling nuclear weapons technology not only to Libya, but also to North
Korea and Iran. That network has now been put out of business. Khan
is under house arrest inside Pakistan. His supplier network is shut
down. (Applause.)
Final point, and then I'll stop -- I'm trying to condense it down.
There's a lot to talk about, and I don't want to take up all the time
myself. There are, I think, a couple of things to be said about why
we've been successful. One is the enormous skill and talent and
dedication of the men and women of the United States military.
(Applause.) Two is that it's vitally important that we pursue a policy
that let's us reach out and address these problems in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and wherever they may be in the world with our military forces,
so we don't end up having to address them here at home with our police,
our firefighters, and our medical personnel on the streets of our own
cities. (Applause.)
And the third and final point I'd make is there is no substitute
for strong, decisive, courageous presidential leadership. (Applause.)
So on that note -- (laughter) -- I'm going to turn it over to you
and let all of you ask me some questions --somebody here with the
mike.
Q I'm from Columbia. My question is involving energy policy.
As you know, one of the great issues that we face today is our
continued reliance on foreign nations for petroleum. One of the things
we could do to address is to increase our use of biodiesel and
ethanol. So could you talk a little bit about your vision for
renewables in the context of the energy policy?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, I think you're absolutely right. The
President put forward a set of recommendations over three years ago in
the energy area, designed to increase our domestic production here at
home to support renewables, to encourage new technology, to promote
conservation, modernize our electricity grid. Unfortunately, that bill
is still hung up in the Senate. We'd gotten it through the House. We
got it through the Senate once. It went to conference, and they took
the conference report back, passed it through the House, but we're
still two votes short in the Senate. That bill includes within it
significant incentives for biodiesel and ethanol. It's very important,
we think, to go down that road because it will help us to diversify our
supplies, but it also will reduce the extent to which we're dependent
on foreign sources of oil for our basic transportation. It's a very
good piece of legislation. We need to get it done. If you know two
members of the United States Senate -- and might I say the Missouri
delegation in Kit Bond and Jim Talent have been great; they've been
very supportive. (Applause.) But as of last week, we were still
trying to resolve those House-Senate differences. And with luck, we'll
get something out before they end their session.
Q Good afternoon, Mr. Vice President. Thank you for coming to
Columbia, Missouri. I am a resident of Columbia. We're beginning to
see job creation improve significantly in Missouri and elsewhere in our
country. We know there's a relationship between a highly educated work
force and economic -- since over 90 percent of our work force is
educated through our public school system, what is the administration's
plans for a continued federal investment in our public schools?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think one of the most important things we've
done -- and this is the President's top priority, this is the first
thing he asked Congress for when he became President -- was the No
Child Left Behind Act. He had the experience in Texas, where he
watched -- looked at the Texas school system and concluded it wasn't
working right, that there was a big gap between what supposedly they
were trying to achieve and actually achieving. Some of the basic
testing showed that Texas was way down the list in terms of the ability
of students to read and write and do math. And so he established in
Texas, on a bipartisan basis, the equivalent of what later became the
notion of No Child Left Behind. And the two basic fundamental
principles that are involved are number one, testing. You cannot know
how well the schools are working, or not working, how well the schools
are meeting the needs of any individual child, or group of children if
you don't measure results. Second was accountability. And those are
the two principles that are embodied in that basic proposition. And
that's what he brought to Washington. He built a bipartisan
coalition. Ted Kennedy was there when he signed the bill, and that
bill is now in play.
We've also significantly increased funding for that portion of the
education act. This is the most sweeping reform since the
Elementary/Secondary Education Act was set up in 1965. The funding in
that Title I of that program, which is what covers, specifically
disadvantaged students, from 2001 to 2004 is up by over 40 percent. So
we're committed to continuing to implement that policy. We're just
beginning to get some preliminary results from nationwide testing to
see how its working. Parents are allowed choices if their kids are in
a failing school to take them out of that school and put them into
public schools, public choice, in effect; and as well as having funds
provided to assist kids who need supplemental help and assistance.
We've still got a long way to go to make it more perfect. But we've
got those basic principles now that have been established. We will
hold our schools accountable for results. And we will measure whether
or not we're making progress. Lynne and I went to public school in
Casper, Wyoming, where we were enormously blessed to have great
teachers, and a school system where the parents were actively engaged
and cared a lot about it. Those are the kinds of schools we need all
across America in our public school system so every kid in the United
States has an opportunity to get a first rate education, and is then
able to take advantage of that to participate to the maximum extent
possible in our magnificent society. (Applause.)
Q I'm from the Lake of the Ozarks. Mr. Vice President, what do
you believe to be the greatest achievement of your administration in
four years?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What do I believe to be the greatest
achievement of the administration -- there's so many. (Laughter.)
Well, I really do believe that it is sort of the fundamental shift
in our attitude as a nation from what it was before 9/11 to what it is
now. For years we had sort of a "turn the other cheek," law
enforcement kind of approach to terror. When we got hit at World Trade
Center in 1993, the man who was primarily responsible for that was a
guy named Ramzi Yousef. We eventually ran him to ground a couple of
years later. He's doing 240 years now at the federal pen in Colorado.
That's good. We got him and put him in jail. But we didn't look
behind the operation. It turns out that his uncle is a man named
Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad is the top planner for
9/11. In 1996, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad is the guy who first went to
Osama bin Laden and talked about using airplanes to fly into
skyscrapers here in the United States. They planned it for fives
years, and executed it on 9/11. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad is now in
custody, as well, too.
The point is that we were willing at that point to bring to bear
the full might of the United States -- our intelligence capabilities,
our law enforcement capabilities, and our military capabilities to go
after the terrorists wherever they may reside. We no longer make that
distinction that we used to -- that the terrorists and the states that
host the terrorists can be separated, that they're split. In effect,
the President said, if you are a terror-sponsoring state, or if you
provide safe haven, you are as guilty of their acts as the terrorists
themselves. It's a whole new departure. And he's taken a lot of flak
for it in the international world. The Europeans don't like it -- some
of them; some of them have been very supportive. But the fact of the
matter is, the United States must lead on this issue. We have to be
out front on it. We cannot build perfect defenses here at home. We
can be successful 99 percent of the time, and they only have to get
through once. If they get through one time with a deadly weapon, a
nuclear weapon, or a biological agent of some kind, we'll suffer far
more deaths than we did on 9/11.
We have to get into the mind set that we're going after them
wherever they are -- wherever they train, wherever they plan, wherever
they raise money, wherever they hide -- and take care of them, and
eliminate them before they can launch more attacks against the United
States. I think that's the biggest achievement. (Applause.)
Q Mr. Vice President, I'm from Columbia, Missouri. We thank
you for the privilege to ask questions. As a person who had the
privilege to wear the uniform of the uniformed services of the United
States, I know my fellow veterans have a deep and abiding affection for
the flag that we see waving behind us. (Applause.) And I know many of
them would support a constitutional amendment banning the degradation
of the flag. Is there a difference between the two campaigns with
respect to this issue? Thank you.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: We believe -- the President and I do -- very
firmly in protecting the flag. We believe we are "one Nation under
God," and that the American people -- (applause) -- and that the
American people ought to be able to say "one nation under God" when
they pledge allegiance to the flag. Unfortunately, we've got some
judges who forget that the Declaration of Independence talks about "one
nation under God." And one of the thing we need to do is to get more
judges on the bench who support those measures. (Applause.)
I think you touched on a key issue. I'll let the opposition speak
for themselves in terms of where they are on those issues. It could
change tomorrow. (Laughter and applause.)
Q (Inaudible.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Did everybody hear the question? All right,
I'll repeat it.
He asked about problems with rising health care costs, and what our
administration plans to deal with that. He especially was talking
about the problems with medical malpractice insurance. And he
mentioned that Senator Kerry was the trial attorney who had been
involved -- Edwards. I get them confused. (Laughter and applause.)
Somebody said the other day that John Edwards got the job because
he was sexy, charming, and good looking. I said, how do you think I
got the job? (Applause.)
Let me -- this is a very important question. Let me talk about the
problem of medical malpractice insurance. The fact of the matter is,
it's had a devastating impact -- the rising cost of insurance for
doctors has had a devastating impact on a number of states. I think
Missouri has had a problem. My own state of Wyoming, just last week
had a special legislative session, something they almost never do
because medical malpractice insurance costs have risen so rapidly that
we're losing doctors all over the state. Our number one insurer, the
largest insurer in Wyoming pulled out.
Say, a doctor, for example -- just to give you an example of it --
in my hometown of Casper, two years ago, their insurance cost $40,000;
today it costs $100,000 a year. There's absolutely -- doesn't appear
to be any upper limit on it. I don't know what that does, of course.
Obviously, we want to preserve the right of people who have legitimate
grievances to be able to go to court and address those grievances.
That's as it should be. Nobody is suggesting that somebody who has
been harmed by a serious breach of medical ethics, or somebody -- a
doctor who has made a serious mistake, that an individual patient
shouldn't be compensated for those errors. But what has happened is
that the way the system works now, we get an awful lot of frivolous
lawsuits filed. Lots of times they file simply in the hope that
they'll never go to trial, that they'll be able to hurrah the insurance
company into paying them a substantial chunk of money. A big chunk of
the money goes to the trial attorneys, not to the patient who has been
wronged. And, of course, the maximum impact is now to make it
impossible for communities to have the kind of medical services they
need because no doctor can afford to practice there because they can't
afford to pay the insurance premium.
In the case of Wyoming, we can't get anybody to come in. We had a
recent situation where a guy was telling a story about trying to
recruit young docs, and he said, look, the first thing you have to do
when you come in, is you're going to have to put up front $80,000 cash
to cover your insurance. And he said, they just laugh at me. Nobody
is going to come with that kind of proposition, especially some guy
just out of medical school who has probably got large debts anyway from
financing his education.
So we badly need to deal with it. The solution, I believe, is
medical liability reform. We've worked that very aggressively. The
President has been a big supporter of it. We've gotten it through the
House; it's been blocked in the Senate. Both Senators Edwards and
Kerry have consistently voted against medical liability reform. They
don't want to see reform of that system. I think it's because,
frankly, they are too close to the plaintiff's attorneys that benefit
from the system and the way it operates today.
I saw some numbers the other day that showed -- I believe these
were numbers out of the Rand Corporation -- that if you take the dollar
that goes for one of these settlements, about 46 percent actually goes
to the client who has been injured; more than 50 percent, 54 percent
goes for attorneys' fees, trial costs and the share of the trial
attorney who basically brought the case -- and that's 30, 40, 50
percent. And that's not right.
There are states out there that have put caps on non-economic
suffering. That's the solution that we think ought to be adopted.
We'll continue to push it as aggressively as we can. And as I say,
we're hopeful that we'll be successful.
The other final point I'd make is, when you've got a profession, a
medical profession out there that's as worried as they are about being
sued, about having these suits brought against them, about their
insurance rates going up, what they do is they practice defensive
medicine. They'll do everything they can in terms of ordering up
tests, whether you need them or not, because they're thinking not
necessarily about treating the patient, they're thinking about the
pending lawsuit. And that, in and of itself, serves to drive up the
total cost of what people -- everybody has to pay, not just those who
are involved in a particular case, but everybody pays a much higher
cost for medical care than would otherwise be the case because of
defensive medicine. And the defensive medicine is a direct result of
the way the current medical malpractice system works. (Applause.)
Q Mr. Vice President, I'm from Jefferson City, Missouri. And
I'm a small business owner with a little over a hundred employees. And
one of the things we talk about is the economy. And I appreciate your
comments on the economy earlier. But what I was wondering is what do
you think happened four years that got us in the little bit of trouble
that we had, and where do you think under your administration it can
go?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: In terms of the economic cycle, you mean?
Well, I think several things happened. We came at the end of a pretty
good run-up in terms of economic performance through the '90s. We
ended up with something of a stock market bubble. That obviously
seemed to contribute to the overall drop in equity values. We saw --
what I noticed at the tail end of 2000, this was right after the
election, I can remember being interviewed on Meet The Press, I said we
were -- I thought we might be at the front end of a recession. And I
took some flak for it at the time. It turned out to be true.
What I was looking at was the number of car-loadings that were
going in terms how railroads, and a lot of our -- trucking industries,
which were sort of of lead indicators of how much economic activity was
out there. And we'd, I think, overbuilt capacity significantly. We
had a lot of excess capacity built into the economy. And we ran out of
steam, if you will, in terms of that economic cycle. And there's a
normal business cycle out there that took hold, and the economy began
to slow down; and then when you added to that the decline in the
market, as well as the attacks of 9/11, which were, frankly, were
devastating, in terms of what it did to the travel and tourism
industries. That combination of things is what really drove us into
the tank.
We're fortunate that we were able to enact the tax program that we
did -- both in '01, '02, and '03 -- because I think that was crucial at
putting a floor under it. We never got a really severe recession. The
bottom didn't drop out. Unemployment went up a little above 6
percent. That was the max. We're back down now -- I guess, we're
about 5.1 percent, here in Missouri; about 5.6 percent nationwide on
unemployment. So one of the things, I guess, I've learned from Alan
Greenspan is that our economy is an amazingly resilient creature. We
don't oftentimes appreciate the enormous strength and dynamism of what
free people do in a free society where people are free to make choices,
where businessmen and entrepreneurs have the opportunity to invest and
take risk, and create businesses, where workers can get a job, and get
a education, improve their circumstance; if things are bad in one
community, pick up and go to another community. And it's that dynamism
of our society overall that I think -- that we're the great
beneficiaries of that.
The main thing that, I guess, I keep coming back to is it's
important to keep government out of the way. (Applause.) There's a
great temptation, sometimes, in Washington to say nothing happens in
the economy unless Washington orders that it happen. And usually,
that's not the case. When we provide for tax relief, for example, in
effect, what we're saying to the American worker and businessman out
there is, you keep it, you'll make a better decision about how to spend
it if we take it back there. (Applause.)
That's a very different philosophy from the one, I think, our
opponents believe in, which is, go out and collect all the taxes you
can, and fund all the government programs you want to operate, because
those programs are what creates wealth in our society. That's not
true. It's the American people that create wealth in our society.
(Applause.)
MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, we have time for one more
question for the Vice President.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Who's got a question? Yes, sir.
Q Mr. Vice President, I'm from Columbia, Missouri. Again,
welcome back to Columbia. How is the government in Iraq really doing?
How do you think it's really affecting us out here? And then something
about
what you think about NASA?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: About NASA? Well, NASA is a great
institution. It has achieved some wondrous things. We're still doing
it day in and day out. I don't know if you've been following the
satellite that we launched, what, seven years ago that's now in orbit
around Saturn. When you think of that, it's mind-boggling -- when you
think about what we've been able to do there to put that payload up.
And it will operate now for a good many years to come. It was the
first ever close-up look at the whole Saturn system. And we did it.
Americans put together the technology, and designed the system and it's
there for all to see.
And we're still -- the President is committed to the program. We'd
like to rejuvenate, if you will, our manned space flight program down
the road. NASA is going to be around for a good long time to come.
With respect to Iraq, the thing I feel very good about is the
caliber of individuals now that have stepped up to take on
responsibility to begin governing Iraq. If you look at Ayad Allawi.
He's the new Prime Minister He is a man who spent a good part of the
recent years of his life working as part of the opposition to Saddam
Hussein. He fled the country some years ago and was living in London.
It's a remarkable story, really -- at one point, Saddam Hussein sent an
assassin after Mr. Allawi -- went into his home, and into his bedroom
late at night, in London, and attacked him with an ax. And he woke up
just in time to avoid getting hit in an absolutely vital spot. But his
leg was nearly severed. He survived the attack, obviously, was
hospitalized for many, many months. His wife was with him that night,
and it was such a traumatic experience for her, she never really fully
recovered from the event.
He's now back in Iraq. He's willing to step up and take on Mr.
Zarqawi, who is sort of the lead terrorist over there, who's launched a
lot of these attacks that have killed a lot of Iraqis. He is a bold
courageous, tough guy. And that's exactly what the Iraqis need at this
point. There are a lot of other very good people involved. A man
named Kanan Makiya, whom I've gotten to know very well, grew up in
Iraq, came to the U.S. to go to school. He's been a professor at
Brandeis, and up at Harvard. He's absolutely committed to democracy
and freedom. He's written two great books about what it was like
living under Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- an eloquent, articulate advocate
of democracy and individual liberty, and is a part of the operation
there now. So there's a long list of people who I think now that they
have the opportunity, now that we've transferred sovereign authority
back to them, now that they understand that they're the ones who are
going to determine the outcome, both in terms of establishing a
political system, that is responsive to the needs and desires of the
people of Iraq, that is representative of all the diverse ethnic
groups, that is democratically elected -- I think they'll get it done.
The other piece of it, of course, is what I mentioned earlier, is
the importance of having Iraqis stand up and take on the responsibility
for destroying the terrorists that are trying to disrupt this whole
process, eliminating the remnants of the old regime that are doing
everything they can to defeat the establishment of democracy in Iraq.
And there we're doing well. We've got a man named Dave Petraeus, he's
the former commander of the 101st Airborne during the course of our
operations in Iraq. He's going back over there now, and is running the
training program to stand up Iraqi armed forces. The Iraqis now,
obviously, if you watch, are suffering more casualties than we are.
And that's as it should be. You don't want anybody to suffer
casualties, but they've got to get into the fight for their own
country. They've got to be willing to fight for their freedom, and
they're doing that.
So I feel pretty good about things. I think when we'll look back
on this period of time, it will be a time when there's been a lot of
concern, a lot of commentary by the critics, but we're only 15 months
into this effort in Iraq, and a little over two years in Afghanistan.
And if we can establish viable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, we
can put a stake in the heart of international terrorism in the Middle
East. And that's what we're trying to do. (Applause.)
Let me thank all of you, again, for coming out today. Let me thank
the Eisserts for being such gracious hosts. And we appreciate very,
very much the fact that you're here. And again, let me mention just
how enormously important the decision is we're going to make on
November 2nd. There's a lot riding on this one. Missouri is a key
state. You were crucial for us last time. And I know that with the
kind of effort that all of us are going to make, that on November 2nd,
that Missouri will be in the winning column with Bush-Cheney, too.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END 1:45 P.M. CDT
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