THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I want to thank all of you for coming out this morning and for giving us the chance to spend a little bit of time with you. We've done a couple of these events various places around the country. And it's a chance to sit down, have a cup of coffee and talk about the issues of the day. I usually open by making a few comments and remarks, and then we open it up, really want to have a conversation.
The unique and distinguishing feature of the event, though, is, of course, the press, which is behind us. We welcome them. We're glad they're here. I just like to remind everybody what you say is being recorded. (Laughter.) You just want to keep that in mind. We don't want anybody surprised if it shows up in the press.
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But we're delighted to be here. This has been a remarkable campaign so far. And of course, Lynne and I were -- left Washington yesterday morning. We were in Dubuque, Iowa; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; stayed overnight in Minneapolis. We'll go on to Duluth from here today, and then up to -- back to Washington tonight. And then we're headed to Colorado and Wyoming this weekend. Colorado to watch the debate the President will have on Thursday night with a group of folks out there, and then on up to our home in Jackson, Wyoming, where we'll go down for the weekend, and I'll get ready for my debate next Tuesday I guess, it is.
So it has been an exciting campaign so far, needless to say. I think the issues that we're addressing are as important as any that I can recall during the course of my political career. And one of the things -- I thought I'd take a few minutes and talk about it this morning because I think it's at the heart of the campaign -- and I don't by any means want to restrict the conversation -- so after I get through with my remarks, I'm happy to talk about anything you want to get into. But at the heart of it, I think is this question of where we're going with respect to our national security strategy in the days ahead, years ahead -- that we're at one of those watershed moments in American history where we're faced with a different kind of threat than we've had to deal with previously, have been since 9/11. And that requires us to make adjustments in terms of our national security strategy, our understanding of our adversaries, what kind of military forces we field, how we posture ourselves and deal with what is a significant threat to the United States, not just for the next year or two, but probably for the next several years -- a little bit like the period right after World War II when all of a sudden we were faced with the prospects of the Cold War; having to deter Soviet aggression, build alliances -- like NATO -- to be able to contain the Soviet Union; created the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and did a number of things that were all geared around dealing with that threat. And then those strategies really become part of our overall posture for the next 40 years, supported by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. And I think we're again at one of those -- as I say -- one of those kinds of moments now as we think about the war on terror and the threat to the United States.
And what we know since 9/11, of course, is that probably the most significant threat we can imagine now from the standpoint of America is the prospects of a group of terrorists in the middle of one of our own cities with a weapon of mass destruction, with a chemical or a biological agent, or perhaps even a nuclear weapon. And, of course, were that to happen, we would find ourselves with the prospect of perhaps hundreds of thousands of casualties in a very short period of time, far worse than anything we've seen yet -- although the attack on 9/11, obviously, when we lost 3,000 people in less than two hours that morning was the worst we'd ever had on American soil. But that's the nature of the threat -- the ultimate challenge that we face today.
To deal with that, the President, obviously, has embarked upon a very aggressive strategy in the aftermath of 9/11. We've done a lot to strengthen our defenses here at home, create the Department of Homeland Security, beef up our intelligence agencies, pass the Patriot Act to give our law enforcement personnel the tools they need in order to be able to prosecute terror, and taken a number of other steps -- Project BioShield which we just passed this past year that provides funding and authority to do a better job of creating defenses against biological attack and so forth.
But a strong defense isn't good enough. You can be successful 99 percent of the time, and if you look at the nature of the threat, if our enemy is successful just one time out of a thousand, it would be devastating in terms of its consequences for the nation. So you also have to do more than simply defend. You've also got to go on offense. And the distinguishing feature of what the President put together as the post 9/11 strategy was that we would aggressively go after the terrorists wherever they, wherever they plan and organize and train. We'll hunt them down. And secondly, that we'll aggressively confront states that sponsor terror, states that provide safe harbor, or sanctuary for terror, or have the capacity to provide deadly technology -- weapons of mass destruction -- to terrorists, a terrorist organization.
And on that basis, we, of course, launched into Afghanistan and then Iraq. In Afghanistan -- took down the Taliban, closed the training camps that were in Afghanistan where they trained to kill Americans, and where some 20,000 terrorists were trained, by one estimate, in the late 1990s, and then scattered back out around the world to set up cells in as many as 50 or 60 countries. And of course, in the aftermath of all that, we closed the training camps, took down the Taliban, captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda. But we've also now stood up an interim government in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai is running it. They have registered 10 million Afghans to vote in the first elections ever, over 40 percent of those are women. And those elections will be held in about 10 days, on October 9th. And by the end of the year, there will be a democratically elected government in place in Afghanistan. And that's the last major piece of the strategy, if you will. It's not enough just to go kill terrorists, or to take down regimes, you've also got to worry about what you put in its place behind it. And the strategy, obviously, involves standing up a democratic government in Afghanistan.
Same thing in Iraq -- because we're convinced that's the best guarantee against having those once again become failed states or be the kinds of governments that develop, as did Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, or that allow them to create a breeding ground, if you will, for terrorism.
In Iraq, a different situation -- but there, again, we moved aggressively. Saddam Hussein's regime is gone. He's in jail. We've got an interim government in place now, been there for about 90 days. Prime Minister Allawi in charge -- was just in the U.S. this past week, spoke before a joint session of the Congress. There, too, they're also committed to free elections. They've already convened a national assembly, will have elections in January. That group will write a constitution, and by the end of next year, there will be a democratically elected government in place under a new constitution in Iraq. And the efforts in Iraq are tougher than in Afghanistan -- right now anyway -- in terms of the level of effort that's required from us, a continuing effort by remnants of the old regime, as well as a man named Zarqawi, who is sort of the lead terrorist there, an al Qaeda affiliate, to do everything they can to disrupt that process.
The level of violence in Iraq will be high, and possibly in Afghanistan, too, over the course of the next few months because they understand the window is closing. We actually intercepted a message that Zarqawi was sending earlier this year to a senior official of al Qaeda, an associate of Osama bin Laden's that basically talked about his strategy for prosecuting his efforts in Iraq through terrorist attacks, but said also in that, that if they ever were successful in establishing a legitimate regime that had reach across the country, that he would then have no choice but to pack his bags and move on, move out of Iraq, that the environment was such that they couldn't survive as a group under those kinds of circumstances.
So the level of violence will be high during this period of time because they're desperate. They know the window is closing. They know they've either got to derail the process now, or ultimately we'll succeed in our objectives there.
The effort in terms of what we're doing is, I think, absolutely worth it. For us to consider, or contemplate as I think some may be suggesting, some of the critics, perhaps, that it's not worth the effort, I think fails to understand the significance of what we're dealing with here. When you look at the global war on terror -- remember that it is a global threat; it's not just the U.S. that has been hit. It's just not New York and Washington. It's also Madrid, and Casablanca, and Riyadh, and Mombassa, and Istanbul, and Baghdad and Beslan, and Bali, and Jakarta. And that series of attacks, the last one in Beslan, in Russia, of course, some 350 dead -- most of them school children -- the need to deal with that global conflict is very real.
The idea that somehow we can pull back and sit behind our oceans and simply look to our defenses and not be actively and aggressively going after the terrorists and those who sponsor terror, I think misreads the situation completely. Over time we'll only see the effort to gain strength on the part of the terrorists. We run the risk that eventually they'll get their hands on those deadlier weapons that they want to use against us. And we know from past experience that that approach doesn't work because that basically is the approach we had pre-9/11. 152ee80cbc
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