[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush (2006, Book I)]
[January 5, 2006]
[Pages 9-13]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks to the United States University Presidents Summit on
International Education
January 5, 2006
Thank you all. Madam Secretary, it's
your building; you can give my speech if you want to. [Laughter]
But first, our Nation sends our deepest sympathies to Ariel
Sharon. He lies immobilized in an Israeli
hospital. We pray for his recovery. He's a good man, a strong man, a man
who cared deeply about the security of the Israeli people and a man who
had a vision for peace. May God bless him.
Madam Secretary, thanks for having me.
I'm here to let the good folks know here how strongly I support the
National Security Language Initiative. I've had a little problem with
the language in the past, so--[laughter]--if you've got room in the
initiative for me, let me know. [Laughter] Condi said, ``Come on by.
We've got a bunch of university presidents here.'' And I said, ``Great,
just so long as we don't have to compare transcripts.'' [Laughter] She's
the Ph.D.; I'm the President. [Laughter]
She's a heck of a Secretary of State,
though, and Don Rumsfeld is a heck of a
Secretary of the Defense, and I want to thank you both for joining
together on this initiative. It's interesting, isn't it, that the State
Department and the Defense Department are sponsoring a language
initiative. It says something about the world we live in. I felt certain
that the Secretary of Education would be here. After all, we're talking
about education, and I want to thank you for being here,
Margaret. But I also find it's
interesting you're sitting next to John Negroponte, who is the Director of National Intelligence.
In other words, this initiative is a broad-gauged initiative that
deals with the defense of the country, the diplomacy of the country, the
intelligence to defend our country, and the education of our people. And
it's an important initiative, and I'm going to tell you why in a second.
But thank you for joining your--together to make this happen.
I want to thank Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick, and I want to thank the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lugar
from Indiana. Senator Pat RobertsPat from Kansas is with us. I think
you'll find this interesting: He has promoted the advanced study of
foreign languages through the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program.
Thanks for doing that. And I want to thank Congressman Rush Holt for being here as well. Thank you for coming, Rush.
Thanks for taking time.
I appreciate all the ambassadors who are here. I'm scanning the
room. I see a few familiar faces, and thanks for serving. What the heck
are you doing here? Like, you're supposed to be--[laughter]--the deal
was overseas. [Laughter]
We're living in extraordinary times. I wish I could report to you
the war on terror was over. It's not. There is still an enemy that
lurks, that wants to hurt us.
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I hate to report that to the American people, but my duty is to lay it
out as plainly as I possibly can. And that's the truth.
And so the fundamental question is, how do we win? What do we do?
Well, in the short term, our strategy is to find them and bring them to
justice before they hurt us. In other words, we've got to stay on the
offense. We've got to be unyielding and never give them a, you know, a
breath of fresh air, never give them a hope that they can succeed. It's
the only way to do it. We must defeat them in foreign battlefields so
they don't strike us here at home.
And that's one of the reasons why the Secretary of Defense is here. He wants his young soldiers who are on the
frontlines of finding these killers to be able to speak their language
and be able to listen to the people in the communities in which they
live. That makes sense, doesn't it, to have a language-proficient
military, to have people that can go into the far reaches of this world
and be able to communicate in the villages and towns and rural areas and
urban centers, to protect the American people.
We need intelligence officers who, when somebody says something in
Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, knows what they're talking about. That's what
we need. We need diplomats--when we send them out to help us convince
governments that we've got to join together and fight these terrorists
who want to destroy life and promote an ideology that is so backwards
it's hard to believe. These diplomats need to speak that language.
So our short-term strategy is to stay on the offense, and we've got
to give our troops, our intelligence officers, our diplomats all the
tools necessary to succeed. That's what people in this country expect of
our Government. They expect us to be wise about how we use our
resources, and a good use of resources is to promote this language
initiative in K through 12, in our universities. And a good use of
resources is to encourage foreign language speakers from important
regions of the world to come here and teach us how to speak their
language.
You're going to hear a lot about the specifics of the program. What
I'm trying to suggest to you, that this program is a part of a strategic
goal, and that is to protect this country in the short term and protect
it in the long term by spreading freedom. We're facing an ideological
struggle, and we're going to win. Our ideology is a heck of a lot more
hopeful than theirs.
You can't have an ideology that works if you say to half the
population in a part of the world, ``You have no rights.'' You can't say
to a group of people, ``My ideology is better than freedom, and if you
speak out, you're going to get--you'll be tortured.''
You see, freedom is the ideology that wins. We've got to have
confidence in that as we go out. But you can't win in the long run for
democracy unless you've got the capacity to help spread democracy. You
see, we've got to convince people of the benefits of a free society. I
believe everybody desires to be free. But I also know people need to be
convincing--convinced--I told you I needed to go to language school.
[Laughter] And you can't convince people unless you can talk to them.
And I'm not talking to them right now directly; I'm talking through an
interpreter on some of these Arabic TV stations.
But we need people in America who can go and say to people, ``Living
in freedom is not the American way of life; it is a universal way of
life.'' We're not saying your democracy has to be like yours. We're just
saying give your people a chance to live in a free society, give women a
chance to live freely, give young girls a chance to be educated and
realize their full potential.
And the best way to do that is to have those of us who understand
freedom be able to communicate in the language of the people we're
trying to help. In order to convince people we care about them, we've
got to understand their culture and
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show them we care about their culture. When somebody comes to me and
speaks Texan, I know they appreciate the Texas culture. [Laughter] I
mean, somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means
they're interested in somebody else's culture. Learning a language--
somebody else's language is a kind gesture. It's a gesture of interest.
It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, ``I
care about you. I want you to know that I'm interested in not only how
you talk but how you live.''
In order for this country to be able to convince others, people have
got to be able to see our true worth in our heart. And when Americans
learn to speak a language, learn to speak Arabic, those in the Arabic
region will say, ``Gosh, America is interested in us. They care enough
to learn how we speak.''
One of the great programs we've got here in America in terms of
people understanding how we think and how we act is these scholarships
we provide to our universities. I know this isn't the topic the
Secretary assigned me to talk about, but
it's one I'm going to talk about anyway. We want young kids from around
the world coming to our universities. It's in our national interest that
we solve visa issues and make sure that--[applause].
We have been calibrating the proper balance after September the
11th, and I fully understand some of your frustrations, particularly
when you say the balance wasn't actually calibrated well. But we're
going to get it right, because the more youngsters who come to America
to get educated, the more likely it is people in the world will
understand the true nature of America.
You can't figure out America when you're looking on some of these TV
stations--you just can't--particularly given the message that they
spread. Arabic TV does not do our country justice. They put out some
kind--sometimes put out propaganda that just is--just isn't right. It
isn't fair, and it doesn't give people the impression of what we're
about. You bring somebody here to college--it doesn't matter what's on
TV--they see firsthand the compassion of the United States of America.
They get to see firsthand that we don't discriminate based upon
religion. They get to see firsthand the multicultural society in which
we live, all united under the fabric of freedom. That's what they get to
see.
And so I'm working with Condi, and
she's working with others, to work with you, to make sure these
youngsters are able to come to our universities. I'll tell you what's
really neat, is to sit down with leaders from around the world, welcome
them in the Oval Office or go to their office; they say, ``You know, Mr.
President, I went to Texas A&M,'' or, ``I went to Stanford''--like
President Toledo of Peru. I mean, it is--it
makes it so much easier to conduct foreign policy and diplomacy when
you've got that common ground of being able to talk about a university
experience here in the United States. It makes it so much easier to be
able to advance the interests of this country when you're dealing with a
leader who doesn't have a preconceived notion about what America is all
about, because he spent time studying here in the United States.
We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages.
We'll welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak
languages. But we're also going to advance America's interests around
the world and defeat this notion about our--you know, our bullying
concept of freedom, by letting people see what we're about. Let them see
firsthand the decency of this country.
And so, Madam Secretary, in front of
these presidents, you and I vow that we'll find that proper balance
between security and letting people come to our universities for the
good of this country.
I--there is no doubt in my mind we will win the war on terror.
There's no
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doubt in my mind that Afghanistan will remain a democracy and serve as
an incredible example. For those of you in education, you might
remember, this was a country that refused to educate young girls. And
now, young girls in most of Afghanistan are going to school.
Iraq--we'll succeed in Iraq. It's tough. And the reason it's tough
is because a handful of killers wants to stop the advance of freedom for
a reason. Democracy in the heart of the Middle East is a major defeat to
their ideology and their ambitions.
And it's hard work. What you're seeing on your TV screen is hard
work. But we've done, as Condi said, hard
work before. We have defeated fascism in the past. We defeated communism
in the past. And we will defeat this ideology of hatred, but it's going
to take all the tools at our disposal.
One of the stories I like to share with people is this. I--one of my
best buddies in international politics is Prime Minister
Koizumi of Japan. He's an interesting
person. Elvis was his favorite singer, for example. [Laughter] Every
time I meet with him, it strikes me as an amazing fact of history that
number 41, President 41, at age 18 fought
the Japanese, and 43, his son, is sitting down with the Prime Minister
working on keeping the peace. It's amazing to me. And something happened
between 41 going into combat and 43 talking to the Prime Minister,
whether it be about troops in Iraq to help this young democracy flourish
in the heart of the Middle East, or whether it be dealing with the
leader of North Korea who is starving his people
to death, and how do we solve that? What do we do about it?
And what happened was that the Japanese adopted a Japanese-style
democracy. It wasn't an American-style democracy; it was Japanese-style
democracy. And that society, that form of government was able to convert
an enemy to an ally. And that's what's happening. I live it when I talk
to the Prime Minister. I see it firsthand.
It's a real part of my family's life.
Someday, an American President is going to sit down and thank this
generation for having the willpower and the determination to see to it
that democracy has a chance to flourish in a part of the world that is
desperate for democracy. Someday, somebody is going to say--[applause]--
somebody someday will say, we're able to more likely keep the peace
because this generation of Americans had confidence in our capacity to
work with others to spread freedom.
And that's what we're facing today, and the stakes are high. It's an
exciting time to be here in Washington, DC. It's a fantastic opportunity
to serve our country. And I want to thank those of you who are serving
it in government, and I want to thank those of you who serve it through
higher education. There's no greater gift to give a child than the
chance to succeed and realize his or her dreams. And you're doing that.
Appreciate you giving me a chance to come by and tell you what's on
my mind. May God bless our country.
Note: The President spoke at 3:50 p.m. at the Department of State. In
his remarks, he referred to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel;
President Alejandro Toledo of Peru; Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of
Japan; and Chairman Kim Jong Il of North Korea.
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