For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
October 3, 2003
Remarks by the Vice President at a Luncheon for Congressman Jim Gerlach
The Desmond Hotel and Convention
Center
Malvern, Pennsylvania
12:28 P.M. EDT
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very
much. Thank you all, and thank you, Jim, for those warm remarks. And
let me thank all of you. It's great to be back in Pennsylvania again.
And I appreciate the warm welcome and the chance to get out of
Washington for a few hours, come up and talk to real folks.
(Laughter.)
I've been looking forward to coming back and sharing the day with
your outstanding congressman, Jim Gerlach. I was proud to campaign
last year with Jim when he ran the first time because I knew about the
outstanding record he'd achieve in the state senate here in
Pennsylvania. And I believed, as I think many people here did,
obviously, that he'd be an outstanding congressman for the sixth
district.
The voters of Berks, Chester and Montgomery clearly felt the same
way on Election Day. And in his freshman year on Capitol Hill, I think
Jim has repaid the people's confidence 100 percent.
I've served in the House of Representatives myself, as Jim
mentioned, for 10 years, and loved my time in the House. I was the
congressman from Wyoming. Wyoming only had one congressman.
(Laughter.) It was a small delegation, but it was quality.
(Laughter.) But I came to appreciate, as the member from Wyoming, what
it takes to make a good congressman. When you're a member from a
single-member state like that, you really have to go out and find
allies on the major issues of the day. If you're from a big state like
California, say, or Texas, and you've got 30 or 40 colleagues to work
on state issues with, the world looks a little different than if you're
the only member from Wyoming. And if you've got to work on a Wyoming
issue, you've got to go find allies and work the other delegations. So
you develop an appreciation for the kind of member that is of value in
terms of being able to help and make commitments they're willing to
sign on and the kind of individual you want to sign up as an ally.
And Jim Gerlach is exactly that kind of congressman. You need to
be able to find somebody who can work hard, stay in close touch with
the people in their district, speak out on those things that matter
most back home, that are grounded in a basic fundamental set of values
and principles. And that's exactly the way Jim approaches every day,
from his work on the transportation and the small business committees
to his service on the Speaker's Prescription Drug Action Team, his
leadership on education, on the environment, and on medical liability
reform.
He came as an experienced legislator. He knows how to work with
colleagues on both sides of the aisle in a spirit of bipartisan, and I
believe he's done Pennsylvania proud in Washington, D.C. And I believe
he has earned another term in the United States House of
Representatives. (Applause.)
Now, as Vice President, I really have only one job. And in the
Constitution -- when they wrote the Constitution and decided to have a
Vice President, as they got down to the end of the Constitutional
Convention, they decided they hadn't given him anything to do. So they
decided, well, we'll let him preside over the United States Senate. So
my only official title is as the President of the Senate. My pay
actually comes from the Senate. About half my staff is paid out of the
Senate. And so I get to spend a lot of time in the Senate, if you
will.
My predecessor, John Adams, our first Vice President, he also was
given floor privileges. That is to say not only did he get to cast
tie-breaking votes, which I do, but he was allowed to go down into the
well of the Senate and to address the issues of the day and engage in
the debate with the other members. And then he did that a couple of
times and they withdrew his floor privileges. (Laughter.) They've
never been restored, so I'm not able to do that.
But I do have the great good fortune to spend a lot of time in the
Senate working with my friends up there. And I've got to tell you,
Pennsylvania has an outstanding delegation in the United States Senate
in Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum. They do a superb job for you.
They're conscientious public servants, leaders on major national
issues. And of course, Arlen is on the ballot next year here in
Pennsylvania at the same time that the President and I are. And we're
going to be very proud, all three of us, to carry Pennsylvania for the
ticket in 2004. (Applause.)
When the President and I took office, it would have been difficult
to predict how we would spend our time while we were there. Every
presidency is shaped by two fundamental things, really. One is the
character, the personality of the individual who sits in the Oval
Office. But the other that has enormous impact are the events that
occur on your watch. And of course, when you become President, you
never know precisely what's going to happen on your watch. Sometimes
you have a relatively quiet time. And other times, things happen that
force you to deal with major crises and problems that nobody could have
anticipated.
And clearly, our administration has been of the latter kind when
you think about 9/11. And I'll talk about that in a minute because I
think it has clearly shaped much of what we do in Washington these
days, but first let me say a word, too, about the economy. Because we
also -- when we came in, we inherited a set of circumstances with an
economy that was on the front end of recession. The stock market had
begun its decline in the middle of 2000. And by the beginning of '01,
the economy had slipped into recession. You take what had happened in
the economy and follow that with the tremendous shock of the terrorist
attack nine months later on 9/11 and all that that entailed for the
economy, economic activity and the enormous cost that imposed. We had
our hands full, clearly, in terms of having to deal with and trying to
get the economy back on the right course.
Now, some nearly three years since we took office, we believe we're
making significant progress. I think at the heart of what we've been
able to do was the President's tax policy. He ran -- and he's kept his
commitment -- ran on the platform that we were going to aggressively
try to reform the tax code and reduce the tax burden on the American
taxpayer. We believe that was also exactly the right medicine in terms
of dealing with the economic circumstances that developed. So if you
look at what we've been able to achieve, we feel very good about that
piece of the agenda.
And as a result of the tax cuts that we were able to pass, with the
help of a Republican Congress, both in 2001 and now in 2003, a family
of four earning $40,000 a year has had their taxes drop from $1,958 a
year to $45 this year -- a very significant development. To the extent
we've been able to put money back into the pockets of the people who
earn it, we think that's been vital to avoiding an even deeper
recession. We think it's been crucial, as well, to getting the
recovery underway.
We've been able to cut rates. We've been able to do significant
damage to the marriage penalty. We've cut back dramatically and phased
out the death tax, been able to reform the double-taxation of dividends
and improve the treatment of capital gains, significant expensing for
small businesses. And of course, small businesses are really the
engine that drive our economy -- that drives our economy. That's where
all the jobs get created. So we think we've made major progress
there.
Those reforms are key to long-term economic growth. And although
some have suggested -- of the other political faith -- that now is the
time to raise taxes, I must tell you the President and I think that's
one of the worst ideas we've heard in a long time. As we're coming out
of the recession, as we're getting the engine of the economy driving
again, for us to now raise taxes would be exactly the wrong response.
We'd put at risk the progress we've made, and clearly, it would cost
probably hundreds of thousands of jobs out there in the economy.
So we think we have turned the corner, that things are looking up.
And as we look at the last half of this year and going into 2004, we
think that the economic prospects are very bright.
Clearly, the attack of 9/11, that we've all experienced, and that I
don't think any of us will ever forget, changed everything in many
important respects. It demonstrated conclusively the enormous
vulnerability of our nation, that our open society is an open border to
be taken advantage of by those who wish us ill, that terrorists were
able to come into our country, gain training in commercial flight
schools, and together then with an airline ticket and a box cutter, get
on an airplane and kill some 3,000 of our fellow citizens in two hours
on that September morning.
The follow-on to that attack, obviously, has been the knowledge
that's been developed subsequently as a result of our activities in
Afghanistan, going into the training camps and getting hold of al Qaeda
terrorists that we've been able to debrief, the documentary evidence
we've acquired that the terrorists are determined to try to acquire
deadlier weapons, that they would love to acquire chemical, biological
or nuclear weapons. And we know that if they ever did acquire that
kind of capability, that they would almost certainly use it.
If you want to contemplate a frightening thought, people ask me
what do I worry most about from the standpoint of threats to the United
States these days, as former Secretary of Defense, I used to worry
about an all-out global war with the Soviet Union, that's no longer the
threat. Now the threat, obviously, is the possibility of an al Qaeda
terrorist loose in one of our cities with a biological, or perhaps, a
nuclear weapon.
What we've learned, as well, since those events of 9/11, is that
this is a global problem. The attacks have occurred not only in New
York and Washington, but also in Riyadh, Casablanca, Mombassa, Bali,
Jakarta, Najaf, Baghdad, in Iraq. It's a global problem, that there
are literally thousands of terrorists who went through those training
camps in Afghanistan in the late '90s. They've gone back home to their
home base of operations, their home terrorist organizations. And we
now have a global problem on our hands.
As we look back and think about those events, and look at the
period before that -- and one of the reasons I say 9/11 changed
everything, a watershed event, with the world after 9/11 looking
different from the world before 9/11, in part, we now recognize that
the old pre-9/11 strategy wouldn't work, that a mistake that was made
in the past was to look at a terrorist attack as some kind of a
criminal enterprise, that the way to respond to it was as a law
enforcement problem.
We go out -- say, take the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 in
New York City -- we treated that as an act by a small group of
individuals. We went and rounded them up. We didn't get them all.
We're still on the hunt for a couple of them, but we got the principal
operator, a man named Ramzi Yousef, and put him in the slammer. And
he's doing 240 years in a maximum security facility now in Colorado.
Case closed. Wrong.
We thought the case was closed at the time because we thought of it
as a criminal enterprise. But if you think about it as part of a
global worldwide effort, part of a conspiracy, if you look behind the
perpetrator and look for ties and connections to organizations or
states, what we find is that that World Trade Center bombing in '93 was
probably the first al Qaeda attack on the United States. We didn't
know it at the time. We know it now.
We know it because Ramzi Yousef, before he was arrested and
prosecuted, later on took part in an aborted conspiracy to take down 12
American airliners over the Pacific, in Manila, that was broke up a
couple of years later. We know it, in part, because the master
planner, the mastermind of the attack of 9/11 on the World Trade Center
in New York, was Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, a man now in custody. He was
Ramzi Yousef's uncle, both part of al Qaeda. We know that that World
Trade Center bombing and the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, we know
this now, it's been in the press from interrogating Khalid Shaykh
Muhammad, who's now in custody, we know that he first discussed that
attack with Osama bin Laden in 1996, five years before it was
launched.
So in effect, there was a war underway here, as far as al Qaeda was
concerned against the United States, but we hadn't picked up on that as
a nation until 9/11, 10 years, or eight years after the first attack.
So clearly the old strategy failed. It didn't work. The idea that
you could deal with this through law enforcement and treat it as a
crime was exactly the wrong approach. What we had to do was to adapt a
new strategy. And that's exactly what we've done. Thanks to President
Bush and his leadership, we've developed a strategy that embodies --
involves several new elements that clearly you want to first and
foremost protect the homeland. So we've developed robust defenses here
at home, passed the act reorganizing the federal government, biggest
reorganization since the Defense Department was set up back in the
'40s, created the Department of Homeland Security, got Tom Ridge, a
great Pennsylvania governor down to Washington to run this major
enterprise.
But good defenses aren't enough. When you're dealing with
terrorists, a defense that's 99 percent successful isn't sufficient
because the 1 percent that may get through can, in fact, kill you. So
since there's no such thing as perfect defense you've also got to have
a strategy that's based on offense, as well. You've got to be able to
go after the terrorists. You've got to destroy the terrorists before
they can launch more strikes against the United States.
And once you adopt that as your objective, then you also do a
number of other things. You, for example, decide to go after the
financial networks. Terrorists don't function in a vacuum. There are
groups, organizations out there that have financed them, provided them
the resources, provided the logistics network on which they operate.
You've go to go take down those financial networks. You've got to go
wrap up and find the financial contributors and the money men who make
it possible for them to operate. We've never done that before. We're
actively and aggressively doing it now.
You've got to work very aggressively with your intel services and
the intelligence services of other nations. And we've done that very
aggressively. One of the most important contributions the President's
made to this enterprise is what we call the Bush doctrine. The night
that he addressed the nation on 9/11, after that speech, we met in the
bomb shelter under the White House, the National Security Council did,
and he made a decision that night that we also had to go after the
states that sponsored terror.
In the pre-9/11 period, when we looked at states that had provided
sanctuary or safe harbor or resources for the terrorists, we also
separated them out from the terrorists themselves. And we'd put them
on a list over at the State Department and say that's a
terror-sponsoring state. But there were few consequences for being so
designated. The President said that day is over with. Henceforth, if
we find a state that is sponsoring terror, we will hold them
accountable for the acts committed by the terrorists, just like we hold
the terrorists accountable. And that's exactly what we've done.
One of the problems we were faced with and one of the things that,
frankly, I think encourages and did encourage terrorist attacks in the
past is that there had never been an effective, sustained U.S. response
to those attacks upon the United States.
If you think back with me for a moment to 1983, 20 years ago, the
attack on our Marines in the barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, 241 killed
one morning, truck bomb, probably Hezbollah. There was no effective
U.S. response to that attack. A few months later, we withdrew, pulled
out of Lebanon, brought everybody home.
1993, World Trade Center bombing; 1995, attack on Saudi Arabian
National Guard Headquarters, five American advisors killed; '96, Khobar
Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia; '98, East Africa embassies, two of our
embassies hit simultaneously, hundreds killed, 12 Americans; in 2000,
the USS Cole struck off Yemen, 17 sailors killed -- you ask yourself
what was the U.S. response to those attacks? How did we deal with the
fact that we'd been struck? And the answer is, we did almost nothing
-- launched a few cruise missiles once or twice at some empty camps in
Afghanistan. But that was really the sum total of the U.S. response.
From the standpoint of the terrorists and those who had designs on
attacking the United States -- every reason for them to believe they
could strike us with impunity, that we might try to impose sanctions,
file diplomatic protest notes, maybe fire off a few cruise missiles,
but it wasn't dangerous if you were a terrorist to launch an attack
against the United States. All that changed on 9/11 when they hit us
here at home and killed 3,000 of our people. And all that changed when
we elected George Bush President of the United States. (Applause.)
Since 9/11, we've mounted major operations in Afghanistan, took
down the Taliban, eliminated the major base for the al Qaeda
organization, killed or captured a great many al Qaeda. And we've also
worked closely with friends in the region out there who've been willing
to pitch in and help. The government of Pakistan, for example, signed
on, has been enormously helpful to us, has helped us wrap up hundreds
of al Qaeda, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the man I've mentioned
earlier who was the mastermind of 9/11.
Saudi Arabia has been very supportive, especially since last May
after they were hit in Riyadh. And they now understand they're right
at the top of the list as an enemy of the al Qaeda organization, as
well, too. So we've been able to work that whole region and make
progress. In Afghanistan, we had to go in forcefully and use U.S.
force. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, working with friendly,
cooperative governments.
Iraq, obviously there, we had to go use force as well, too. And
the reason we had to do Iraq, if you hark back and think about that
link between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was
the place where we were most fearful that that was most likely to
occur, because in Iraq we've had a government -- not only was it one of
the worst dictatorships in modern times, but had oftentimes hosted
terrorists in the past -- the Abu Nidal organization, the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, suicide -- payments to the families of suicide bombers
in Israel and Palestine, but also an established relationship with the
al Qaeda organization, and, without question, had previously had and
used weapons of mass destruction -- chemical weapons against the
Iranians and against the Kurds.
For all of those reasons it was vitally important that we deal with
the threat in Iraq, as well, too. One of the interesting things -- and
this is a bit of sidelight maybe, but I think it's important that
people understand this, we've had this whole debate over, well, maybe
Saddam didn't really have WMD. Maybe he was just bluffing, that
somebody cooked the books and came up with this notion that the Iraqi
government had invested in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Well, first of all, of course, the intelligence community in the
United States going back many years, including into the prior
administration, concluded that he did, indeed, have programs for
chemical, biological and nuclear programs -- nuclear weapons. But
yesterday, David Kay, who is the man that's been designated to go
supervise something called the Iraqi survey group -- this is a group of
technical experts, gone to Iraq. He used to work in the UNSCOM, the
old U.N. inspection operations, an American scientist, a very well
qualified man. He went before the intelligence committees of the House
and Senate and gave classified testimony, sort of a status report.
It's not the final report. He's got many months of work yet to do, but
a status report on where we are. That testimony has now been
declassified, and I thought I'd read a couple of important paragraphs
to you today because, frankly, I can turn on the television sometimes
at night, and I have the report in front of me and I don't recognize --
(laughter) -- the way it's described by our friends in the press.
But let me just read to you selected passages:
"Iraq's WMD" -- weapons of mass destruction -- "Iraq's WMD programs
spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions
of dollars, and was elaborately shielded by security and deception
operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi
Freedom." End quote.
New quote:
"We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and
significant amount of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United
Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery
of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through
the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information
they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment
and activities that the Iraq survey group has discovered that should
have been declared to the U.N."
Now, let me read a few examples of the kinds of things they found,
a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraq
intelligence service that contained equipment subject to U.N.
monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW, chemical, biological
weapons research.
A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing, of BW
agents that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections
were explicitly ordered not to declare to the United Nations.
Every time they failed to declare something to the United States,
they were in material breach of the U.N. Security Council Resolution
1441, and that was deemed by everybody who voted for that resolution,
which was everybody in the Security Council, to be sufficient cause to
go to war to make Saddam Hussein comply with this resolution.
Next item, reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a
scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological
weapons. New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo
Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever and continuing work on liacin aflatoxin,
which had not been declared to the U.N.
Documents and equipment hidden in scientists' home that would have
been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and
electromagnetic isotope separation.
A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, not fully declared, and an
admission that they had tested them out to a range of 500 kilometers.
That's 350 kilometers beyond the legal limit that they were allowed.
Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellent useful
only for prohibited Scud-bearing missiles. Plans and advanced design
work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000
kilometers, well beyond the 150-kilometer range limit imposed by the
U.N.
Missiles with a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to
threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo,
Abu Dhabi.
Clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from
North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer range ballistic
missiles, probably the No Dong; 300-kilometer range anti-ship cruise
missiles and other prohibited military equipment, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera.
So there's no question in my mind but what Saddam was guilty of
what we said he was guilty of, and that the action that the President
ordered in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If we had had that
information and ignored it, if we'd been told, as we were, by the
intelligence community that he was capable of producing a nuclear
weapon within a year if he could acquire fissile material and ignored
it, if we had not paid any attention to the fact that al Qaeda was
being hosted in Northeastern Iraq, part of poisons network producing
ricin and cyanide that was intended to be used in attacks both in
Europe, as well as in North Africa and ignored it, we would have been
derelict in our duties and responsibilities. There was no way this
President could have done that. So we launched the effort -- I think
-- and have had great success.
In Iraq, major efforts are underway to rebuild after taking down
the regime. We've got a governing coalition in place -- of Iraqis
now. We've appointed Iraqis to run all of the ministries. Over 90
percent of the local governments have councils that they've put in
place. All the schools are open, the hospitals are open, the
universities are open. Oil production is back up to almost 2 million
barrels a day. The electricity grid is operating close to pre-war
levels. They still need more because they've let it degrade over time,
but they've made significant progress there. The economy is picking
up. There are thousands of new small businesses. The city of Baghdad,
the streets are bustling with economic activity.
There still is a security threat, no question about it. And our
people will be engaged over there dealing with that security threat as
long as it exists. A lot of it is either remnants of the old regime,
or al Qaeda. Al Qaeda who were there before and who are there since
we've gone in. But our troops are doing an absolutely magnificent job,
and they deserve the thanks and the support of every American.
(Applause.)
What's at stake here is our success in the global war on terror.
If we can plant in the middle of the Middle East in Iraq and in
Afghanistan representative governments, democratically elected
governments, governments that are no longer safe havens for terrorists,
that are no longer engaged in manufacturing weapons of mass
destruction, that don't launch wars against their neighbors, as Saddam
Hussein did twice, that have committed to the kinds of things that
people in the United States are committed to, want to become
functioning, sovereign members of the international community, we will
have dealt a massive blow to the terrorists. And they know that. They
understand that. They know that this is a battle to the death, if you
will, in the streets of Baghdad and in Kabul, Afghanistan, and
throughout those countries.
We've got a great start. We've got first-class people we're
working with over there. It's absolutely essential we follow through
and get the job done. And that's what it's all about. I think the
American people understand. I think they know very well that it's far
better for us to take on the al Qaeda and destroy their base of
operations overseas than it is to have to deal with them here in the
United States. We know what that's like, because we had to do it on
9/11. The world is going to be a safer more secure place for our kids
and our grandkids if we get it right, we follow through, we do what we
set out to do. The President is absolutely determined to do that.
(Applause.)
I've rambled on long enough, talked more than I planned to talk
today, but the key -- one of the keys to this enterprise, as well is,
that we continue to have the kind of outstanding members of Congress
that you've sent us from Pennsylvania, especially in people like Jim
Gerlach, Joe Pitts, Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum. It means so much to
us in terms of what the President and I have to do on a daily basis to
have a Congress that is controlled by a majority, both houses by
Republicans. I don't say that just in the partisan sense, but I sure
am grateful for the fact that Ted Stevens, of Alaska, is the Chairman
of the Senate Appropriations Committee, instead of Bobby Byrd, of West
Virginia. (Laughter.) And I could repeat that litany down through all
the committees.
But it's vital to our success that we continue to have the support
of the American people, that we continue to have your support, and that
you continue to send us outstanding members who are willing to go back
there and help us do what's right and what needs to be done, as I say,
not only for this generation but for future generations. Thank you
very much. (Applause.)
END 12:58 P.M. EDT
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