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9.18.2001

September 11

My Address to the Nation
(if I were President)

A Policy of Peace: The High Road

My fellow Americans, the horrible events of the past few weeks have brought us all up short and taught us more about ourselves than we could have imagined. We are spending more time with our families, evaluating our priorities. We have been giving our time, energy, money, and even our own blood to help the victims, in unbelievable numbers and with amazing generosity. As a nation we have remembered that our heroes are firefighters, paramedics, and police, who go where no one wants to be and do the most gut-wrenching and dangerous of jobs. We have learned new definitions of valor, in unarmed citizens facing down armed killers in the skies of Pennsylvania, and in the strength and courage of those who perform the unbearable work of sifting through the debris fields of Manhattan. I have been most honored to witness one of your finest hours.
Sometimes justice can be swift. The men most responsible for these acts of terror, the terrorists aboard the planes, perished in their crimes, robbing us of the opportunity of bringing them to justice. I have to believe that they are already facing their eternal judgment. No matter what your beliefs tell you of life-after-death, these men must be facing the very worst of judgments, the most fiery of hells. For them, we will have to trust that eternal damnation is punishment enough.
Justice for their accomplices on the ground will be less swift, but no less sure. Your government has been working feverishly, with the help of our allies, both old and new, to find out who committed such terrible and cowardly acts. These terrorists will be brought to justice. They will face trial, and the evidence of their guilt with be laid out before the world. They will be condemned for the vile murderers that they are, and they will be appropriately punished. The justice of our courts may be slower, and indeed significantly more difficult, but it is the price of civilization and its fruits are sweeter in the long term.
In the aftermath of the tragedy you heard me speak of war. Armies are preparing, citizens are preparing, politicians and the media are preparing. Tonight, I would like to discuss this war with you, so that you can prepare.
Some would probably argue that as a businessman come to this office I am ill prepared to lead a nation to war. But as a businessman I have prided myself in finding the best and the brightest and empowering them to do the jobs that they are trained to do. Our generals and planners and those of our allies are some of the greatest tactical and strategic minds who have ever lived. They have better intelligence data, better equipment, and better trained soldiers than any fighting force ever arrayed in human history. Surely no nation could stand against the incredible destructive power that we could bring to bear.
Unfortunately, we do not have a convenient target that we can point to on a map and send in our armies. This war is unlike any other in human history in that there are no nations to fight, if we examine nations with eyes of justice instead of blind eyes of revenge. Our enemy is a philosophy, not a nation. It is a belief system and a point of view. It is the perspective that we who have been prosperous are responsible for the poverty of the rest.
Whatever the religious verbiage of the propaganda being raised against us, we know the truth. The hatred of us that inspired so many to give up their lives to hurt us is not about God. Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, by whatever name you call God, all religions teach that He desires peace, not war, love and not violence. We recognize that the religion being invoked in justification of these atrocities is just like the religion that has been invoked by mad men of previous generations--empty. It is hollow and self-deceptive, a house of cards built by mad men to justify in their own consciences the evil that they choose to do. These mens' religion is worthless and fake. They have taken words of wisdom and twisted them to support selfishness and evil.
So our enemy is not a nation or religious group, but a small group of fanatics. They won't do us the service of gathering together in a single place. They hide in many nations, hiding their feelings and biding their time. Some of them may be in the United States right now. Rooting them out will be a delicate and dangerous job. We will surely not send tanks and armies into the neighborhoods of America, looking for a handful of individuals. And we will not send tanks and armies into other nations' neighborhoods if we can possibly avoid it. This is a job requiring a different touch. We are chasing rats, hiding in the sewers of the world. This is a job for police and lawyers, not soldiers.
Does this mean that our coalition against terror is useless? Certainly not. These same great nations who are willing to stand with us in battle will be standing with us in court. They will be policing their own sewers, chasing down those rats. And we will work with them to stop the movement of these evil men from country to country by improving our data sharing on terrorist suspects. But this is not all of the weapons in our arsenal.
Just because these terrorists fight an unconventional war does not mean that they do not have goals that we can thwart or support bases that we can't drive away from them. The terrorists themselves are elusive, but just as a conventional army requires supplies, so too the terrorists are dependent upon certain supplies that we can deny them. In this war on terrorism, we will deny the terrorists safe haven in sympathetic countries. We will deny them financial support. We will deny them the easy access to their targets. And we will deny them the moral imperatives that they have used as their soapboxes.
The terrorists are dependent upon a small number of sympathetic nations. We can persuade those nations to provide protection no more. I intentionally say persuade instead of force or coerce. This cannot be done by force, it can only be accomplished through friendship and goodwill. We have traditionally had little friendship or goodwill in that region, and that will change starting now. At the same time that we are asking the nations of the Middle East to join our coalition against terror and terrorists, we will be sitting down at the negotiation tables with these nations and renewing our ties. We will not come empty-handed to the negotiation tables. We will bring an easing of sanctions. We will bring offers of support in humanitarian efforts--canals, schools, and hospitals. We will bring understanding of the special needs of these nations for respect of their religious beliefs--as many of the nations in the region are Theocracies instead of Democracies.
This is a sea change in foreign policy. No longer will the United States use economic isolation as a policy to cause change within other nations. We will use communication and trade to deal openly and honestly with the current governments. We will not turn a blind eye towards their policies that we disagree with, but we will communicate with them.
We have been criticized in the past for trying to make every nation like ourselves, not respecting their culture or history. That accusation is not unfounded. We are very proud that through freedom and justice we have built the most powerful economy and one of the highest standards of living that the world has ever seen. World history does clearly teach that Democratic nations, nations with strong guarantees of personal freedom do build economies and standards of living that can be matched by no other form of government. We will not cease to encourage other nations towards freedom and democracy, but we will do it by working with current administrations instead of trying to overthrow them.
This will require some fence-mending. Some of these nations will ask for reparations for wrongs they believe we have committed as a nation. We believe that every act they call wrong was in fact justified. In those cases where perhaps we were in the wrong, we will pay appropriate reparations. Some of these nations have complaints about the way that American businesses treat workers in their countries, this will have to be corrected. Some of these nations believe that we have worked insidiously behind their backs to thwart their economic success. We will not be able meet those accusations because we will not be able to prove the negative. In those cases we will only be able to prove current goodwill and future assistance. Again, these nations must meet us at the negotiation table to discuss these differences and agree on new paths of peace.
This will not be a quick path, but it leads to peace. The terrorists will certainly attempt to dissuade us from forming bonds of friendship with these nations, and we must be steadfast and determined to see this path through. When we have repaired our reputation throughout the region, these terrorists will be homeless and friendless. They understand that. Their attacks have been specifically calculated to cause just the opposite reaction, to draw us into armed conflict with those nations, and to further secure their safety there.
I have walked to the edge of that precipice, and I have looked over the edge and down into the abyss of perpetual retaliation. We can't kill enough other people to bring back those we have lost, and we will not try. I will not be responsible for leading this great nation into that turmoil. We will take the high road, justice and compassion. We are emancipated from revenge and retaliation. We are emancipated from being held in terror, or from soiling ourselves in the evil of murdering innocent people. We are emancipated from our own worst nature. This is indeed our finest hour.
We will repay evil with good. We will choose public justice over private murder. We will ask forgiveness of those who feel we have wronged them, and we will be gracious to them. For perhaps the first time in human history, a nation will rise up and demonstrate true leadership and true greatness, not with the power of our army--though it is great--but with the strength of our character and the might of our compassion. The word 'American' will become a badge of honor and laurel of praise in the every corner of the earth.
We will feed people instead of kill them. We will help instead of harm. We will educate instead of argue. We will work for the good of all nations. And we will be unbelievably blessed. We will sleep safely and righteously in our beds. And peace will pour forth like mighty rivers on this battered world.
My fellow Americans, this is our war. We will fight earnestly with those who brought this war to us. But we will not start down the path that they have laid, into widening conflicts and many more innocent people dead. May we find peace.

-Aristides
September 18, 2001