... Now, if you accept that analysis, I hope the first thing I said is more compelling. We've got to win the fight we're in. The Al Quaeda network and Mr. Bin Laden are of an order of magnitude today more able than any other terrorist network in the world. But it is not enough because there's no way for us to put the Genie back in the bottle. It's not like we can go take care of business in Afghanistan and put the walls up and put the distances back and bring the information back. It's not like we can reverse the world we live in. And you wouldn't like it if we did. I suspect you like most of the positive things about this new world. Therefore we have to look ahead and say, ok, so we'll win the fight we're in but we also have to create a world where we have more partners and fewer potential terrorists. And how are we going to do that? We have to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens of the 21st century world, number one. Number two, we have to deal with the fact that most terrorists come from places that aren't democracies. And number three, we have to deal with the special challenges presented in the Muslim world, because Islam's our fastest growing religion in America, and we have to lift up the positive forces there, and encourage those with enough courage to stand up for them. When I moved to New York, I was given a book written in 1949 by a wonderful writer named E.B. White, called Here is New York. He commented on the fact that New Yorkers and a lot of other people died in Pearl Harbor, and how vulnerable they felt after the atom bomb dropped in Hiroshima, and the irony that the United Nations building, the symbol of peace, was being built in New York after the war in response to the dropping of the atom bomb. Here's what he said fifty-two years ago. It could have been written or September 11th:

... We now see a race between the destroying planes in the struggling parliament of man. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution. This riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence and racial brotherhood. This lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway is the home of all people and all nations, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errands forestalled.

... Amazing, isn't it? Fifty-two years ago he foresaw a time when New York would be attacked from the air as the symbol of all peoples and all places. At the time he thought it was because the UN was there. Now all New York looks like the UN, just like you do. I'll say again, this is a struggle to define the soul of the 21st century. We have to win the fight we're in but we also have to create more partners and reduce the terrorist pool. So what do we have to do? First, we have to reduce poverty and create more economic opportunity. Last year we relieved the debt of the poorest countries. We ought to do more of it, because we only relieved the debt if they would put money to education, health care, or economic development, to make sure the money wouldn't be wasted, and the stories are stunning, what's being done with this money in these countries. We should do more of that. Last year we gave two million micro-enterprise loans to poor people in Asia, Latin American, and Africa. We ought to be giving twenty million a year or more. They average fifty, sixty dollars apiece. They put a lot of poor village people in businesses. We should do more, a lot cheaper than going to war. There's a Peruvian economist named Hernando De Soto who wrote a book I recommend to all of you called The Mystery of Capital, pointing out that the poor people of the world control today five trillion dollars in assets in their homes and their businesses, but they are still shut out of capitalism because they can't borrow any money on their assets, because their assets are not recognized within the legal system of their country. For businesses, because the legal system is so bogged-down and cumbersome and expensive that people can't get into it at an affordable price, and for people who live in shanties, they have no way getting addresses or land titles that can be verified and protected in court, so nobody will loan them money on their houses. So De Soto says, he's going around the world working on every continent saying, look, if you could just let poor people legitimize their assets, then they could get credit and it would be far better than all the foreign aid and foreign investment put together, because they have five trillion dollars worth of stuff, it's just useless to them. We ought to pay to help this guy do this project in every country in the world. You ought to hear the history of American property rights. We fought over this for decades. But you think about it, every one of you that take for granted your family's home mortgage or car loan or business loan. The reason you can get a car loan is, you can establish title to the car, and it's an asset worth something so people can loan you money on it. We ought to fund this around the world. We ought to train people to do what we take for granted in America. One of my former administration members is out here in the audience, Melanne Verveer. She and her husband were my classmates at Georgetown and she was Hilary's chief of staff and she now is working with Georgetown with a group called Vital Voices, which Hilary and Melanne helped to establish, women's groups all over the world working for peace and also empowerment. They've had here women from China, Vietnam and other places training them to do what we take for granted. This doesn't cost any money and it wins big benefits. So, these are the kinds of things that we ought to do economically.

(Some Remarks as delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton Georgetown University). November 7, 2001